The picture's a little blurry, but this is the whole process. Plucking, withering, rolling, fermentation, drying, sorting, tasting, packaging.
First, the tea is grown. Lots of it. Then it's plucked. They take two leaves and a bud. New, young leaves only are picked. Old leaves are no good for tea. Bushes are pruned every five years, and then left to grow for six months before they are plucked again. The entire countryside is covered with tea bushes, and they are all the same type of tea.
Withering. Tea leaves are brought in here, where for up to 18 hours they are left to wither on these giant racks. Withering removes half the water weight from the leaves, so 2000kg of leaves become 1000kg after withering. They basically open the windows and let the leaves dry, providing a little steady breeze to help the process along.
It was too dark to get a shot of the rolling and fermentation processes. Basically with rolling, they take the withered leaves and literally roll them, which creates those long rolled tea leaves you may have seen when you drink loose leaf tea. Rolling also breaks the leaves into smaller pieces. Afterwards, they are piled onto long tables and left to sit for up to 90 minutes. This natural fermentation oxides the leaves and provides the flavor of tea. For a stronger flavor, they leave the leaves to ferment longer. Lighter teas ferment for shorter periods of time. The picture above is a dryer, which removes the rest of the moisture from the leaves and breaks up any remaining larger leaves. Tea is then sorted and stems are removed.
Each factory has a group of dedicated tasters who brew a little of the tea and taste it for flavor, color, freshness, etc. Much the way wine tasters make sure their wine is ready for market. Once they have determined a batch is ready, the wine is packaged and shipped to auction in Colombo, where tea sellers from around the world come to buy their product. Twinings, for example, buys various fresh estate teas and blends them together to make the Twinings brand. All the tea that comes from Sri Lanka is Orange Pekoe. Orange because of it's color, Pekoe because the tea grown here came from the seeds of a plant in China (as in Peking).
