Sakare Gold Black

Description

Sakare Gold Black is a fruity Tanzanian black tea from a farmer owned and run Sakare Speciality Tea Cooperative. Focusing on women empowerment and crafting artisanal hand made orthodox teas, the Cooperative produces some unique teas not found elsewhere in Tanzania. This black tea delivers a delicate flavour with fruity mineral notes and a lightly tannic aftertaste. This current lot is from the October 2024 harvest.

You may also be interested in our Sakere Roasted Green version.

We source this tea directly from the Sakare Speciality Tea Cooperative that is farmer owned and led, with many of them being women farmers. The leaves for this Tanzanian black tea were collected from an 8-hecatre organic tea farm and other surrounding smallholder farms. The processing of the tea is done at a small-scale artisanal factory (you can see the photos of it below) that focuses on high quality, single origin orthodox teas. The Cooperative is specifically committed to empowering women farmers and workers in the area, sharing the profits between them. They also invest in speciality tea training, providing access to processing machinery and supporting farmer investment activities. This shows a stark contrast to the majority of the CTC tea industry in Tanzania that is geared towards tea bags where tea is traded at commodity prices. The mass produced nature of cheap CTC teas results in the farmers getting prices dictated by multinational conglomerates, while having zero involvement and minimum support outside the bare minimum price paid for their hard toil.

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This Sakare Gold Black tea comes from the East Usambara Mountains region of Tanzania. The farms and the factory are located at an altitude of around 1,000m and receive two rainy seasons per year. The tea farms are surrounded by an indigenous rainforest, a unique habitat that requires protection. Hence the small holder nature and organic production is well suited to this area since it is not the kind of high intensity farming that is harmful to the natural environment. The terroir of this area certainly lends a complexity and uniqueness to the flavour of the teas produced here. Combined with careful artisanal hand processing, it does deliver some intriguing results.

This Sakare Gold Tanzanian Black tea has large dark leaves that produce a dark amber liquor with a fruity aroma. The flavours are mild and delicate, delivering a smooth profile that is more akin to finely crafted Chinese black tea than the usual bold types to come from Africa. The sweet fruity flavour had light mineral notes and pleasant lightly astringent tannins on the aftertaste that add complexity.

This tea is best brewed at 90°C for 3-4 minutes and can be brewed 2+ times. We can also recommend experimenting with gongfu brewing of this particular tea.

Sakare Gold Black tea was first featured in our January 2025 Curious Tea Subscription Boxes.