When Dhiraj Arora talks about tea, you almost hear Fyodor Dostoevsky’s impassioned plea: I say let the world go to hell, but I should always have my tea. (Dostoevsky was known to go through several cups of black tea in a day; his love of the brew has even inspired some modern-day blends.)
Hear Arora talk about the decadent toffee flavour and coffee notes of Nolen gur tea, and the fruity-floral combination in the Lychee Rose tea by Karma Kettle, and you might think he is reciting a sonnet. That’s how much besottedness there is in his description of tea.
Yet Arora doesn't just love tea, he knows quite a bit about it too. A Kolkata-resident, Arora has studied at the World Tea Academy (USA) and picked tea technicalities in Tea Sommelier Institute (Sri Lanka). He and his wife, Priti Arora, are the founders of Karma Kettle, an artisanal tea company with more than 75 varieties of tea listed in its pretty catalogue.
In the Karma Kettle’s cafe in Ballygunge (Kolkata) and Cochrane Place boutique hotel in Kurseong (West Bengal), he brews Marrakech (green tea with spearmint), Big Ben (Earl grey with rose), Pina Colada (black tea with pineapple & coconut), Tahiti (caffeine free tea with strawberries, cockscomb, hibiscus). There is something about tea that keeps Arora steeped.
He wasn’t to a tea estate born. Neither did tea run in his veins. There was the usual tea in his childhood home but he never took to the warm beverage until he reached England for his schooling. It was there that he discovered that there was more to the brew than the omni-served milk/sugar boiled tea. He tasted green tea that wasn’t bitter, that unusual flavour of Korean ginseng tea and other tea that, as Arora reminiscences, “tasted better”. As a teenager, he tasted better tea in England but tea was still not his favourite beverage.
It was only after the family bought an old bungalow (Cochrane Place) in Kurseong that Arora was drawn towards the details of tea. Perhaps geography conspired for this love to bloom. The bungalow is hemmed by tea gardens, and from the top floor, one can see ribbons of mist dropping on the terraced gardens.
“I used to take our hotel guests to the tea factories in Kurseong on estate visits and also watched buyers from Europe walk in and out of Kurseong tea factories. Plus, the lingering muscatel smell of freshly roasted Darjeeling tea drew me and I soon became a tea aficionado,” says Arora who has also studied finance in Canada.
In Cochrane Place, nearly 100 different tea blends were served - paan chai, watermelon chai, mixed fruit chai, passionfruit chai… There was tea and more tea. And some tea-leaf fritters, too.
When Karma Kettle was founded in 2015-16, Arora started working with small and medium tea growers based out of Assam, Darjeeling and the Nilgiri mountains to create handcrafted tea in small batches. Having a nose for tea and four tea-masters on the roster helped create award-winning blends like the signature Paan Chai, Passionfruit tea and Kashmiri Kahwa.
Among the 75 different varieties of tea on Karma Kettle’s catalogue, there’s also a small selection of imported teas - genuine Matcha from Shizouka, Japan or Taiwan oolong tea with ginseng, rooibos from South Africa.
Karma Kettle’s market is predominantly India but in the past year, the company has been exporting tea to USA, Canada, Brazil, Hong Kong. Singapore and Australia.
In 2019, the United Nations instituted International Tea Day - to be observed every year on May 21 - to "promote and foster collective actions to implement activities in favour of the sustainable production and consumption of tea and raise awareness of its importance in fighting hunger and poverty".
Though Indians have come a long way from just drinking kadak chai to opting for wellness tea, herbal teas or tisanes, matcha and cold brew teas, the tea-tale is not without its challenges.
“India is a very price-sensitive tea market - we still need to educate people that quality tea is expensive. People still do not know how to brew loose leaf tea properly, an absolute essential to appreciate their real flavour. Also, we have brilliant hand-rolled orthodox teas from Darjeeling, Nilgiris, Assam and tea regions in Kangra and North East which are not being celebrated as much as they should,” says Arora.
Arora loves the grassy astringency of his favoured Darjeeling First Flush and the fragile beauty of a Silver needles white but his mind - and nose - right now is heavy with the whiff of shatkora flowers, rosella and lemon palm leaf. That’s the tea currently brewing in Arora’s mind. Soon, it will be on Karma Kettle’s shelf and in the cups of tea drinkers.
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