100 cuppas a day, a decade in training: Inside the world of a tea master blender
Master blender Vitor da Silva in the tasting lab at Twinings headquarters - Clara Molden
Rows of white porcelain cups line the benches, each one carefully and precisely filled with water from a huge stainless steel kettle. Tea leaves slowly bubble to the surface before being quickly strained and poured. Everything works like clockwork to keep the temperature, infusion time and water quality exactly right.
Silence falls over the tasting room. Then, with a whirl of his silver spoon, master blender Vitor Da Silva steps forward for his first taste, shattering the hush with a sharp guttural slurp that sounds like a car back-firing. He rolls the tea round in his mouth, contemplating its flavour and texture, then ejects it in one fluid motion into a waiting spittoon.
The tasting room at Twinings HQ in Andover, Hampshire, resembles a high-school science lab. Three rows of benches look towards the north-facing windows (the aspect vital to ensure light levels are consistent throughout the day), and behind them, racks contain 30,000 indexed samples of tea leaves from Kenya, China, India and beyond.
It’s here that the 10-strong team of master blenders spend their days, sampling hundreds of cups of tea every day, making sure that each of the 9bn tea servings the company sells annually tastes exactly as it should year in, year out.
“We describe ourselves as gatekeepers of quality”, explains Bryony Osmond, another master blender who has worked at Twinings since 2008. “It’s our job to taste every batch of tea as it arrives, then to categorise its attributes. We put a blend together from those various batches, to get a final product that tastes exactly how we want it to.”
Bryony Osmond, master blender at Twinings - Clara Molden
Each tea is assessed by the master blenders individually. Using 95 different descriptors, they categorise tea leaves based on their colour, viscosity, strength and flavour.
It’s a more complicated process than you might think. “Tea is an agricultural crop”, explains Da Silva. “Similar to wine, yesterday’s batch might be different to today’s. It’s affected by weather, by soil, altitude, and the manufacturing process. Each blend and batch can be different.”
But, as every tea drinker knows, half the comfort of a cuppa is in its familiarity: a different brew with every bag is hardly the experience customers want. A wet summer in Sri Lanka or a drought in China is no excuse.
“I describe my job as managing change”, says Da Silva, who has been on the Twinings blending team for 14 years. “And yes, that includes climate change. Weather patterns in tea-growing regions are a lot more erratic, much more extreme. We’re seeing more droughts and more flooding than when I first joined Twinings.”
It’s not just keeping tea bags the same either, Osmond stresses. “We have over 600 blends in our business, supplying to over 120 different countries, so there’s a lot of variety,” she says. They operate as buyers as well as blenders, and “work with the research and development team to create new products.”
Da Silva and Osmond have to protect their palates to make sure their tasting notes are perfect. “You need to be mindful, not just about illness, but also what you eat and drink,” explains Da Silva. “You have to drink lots of water and avoid strong foods like curries, garlic or coffee for 24 hours before tasting.”
“We have strict protocols in the lab too”, adds Osmond. “No perfume or aftershave, no strong deodorant, no hand cream, no lipstick.”
Glass containers of herbal and green teas prepared for tasting by the Twinings master blenders - Clara Molden
Neither Da Silva nor Osmond started out as expert food tasters. He studied digital electronics in Portugal before moving to the UK for a role at Benedick’s mints, while she worked at an import agency specialising in bathroom and kitchen furniture. Through Twinings’ blending programme, they’ve built up their skills.
At around a decade, it takes longer to train as a master blender than it does to complete medical school. “Recruitment involves some tasting”, says Da Silva. “If you couldn’t taste the difference between a black tea and a green tea, or couldn’t differentiate between bitter and sour, then it wouldn’t work. But the more important factor is enthusiasm.
“Becoming a master blender is a 10-year journey”, he explains. “You go travelling for months to all of our growing regions, and work hard to refine your palate. The basics of taste are important, but we can train that, what we really need is the right person who has a passion.”
Just over a year ago, the blending team found an ideal recruit: one whose passion for tea is in his DNA.
Despite his surname, Matthew Twining’s enrolment wasn’t written in the stars. “I’m the 11th generation of Twining to work here”, he grins, “but I didn’t plan to be. I did psychology at university, then went to work as a chef during my gap year. During my travels I began to become interested in tea. I saw an internship advertised here and applied.”
It was Twining’s great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather, Thomas Twining, who in 1706 opened Britain’s first ever tea room on the Strand in London (it is still open to this day). The company rode the tea wave of its own making, winning a royal warrant to supply Queen Victoria in 1837 and holding it ever since.
Master blender Matthew Twining, the 11th generation of the Twining family to work in tea - Clara Molden
But it wasn’t family history that won over Twining to the company: he fell in love with the product. “I’m fascinated by how much you can do with one species by changing where it’s grown, what time it’s harvested”, Twining enthuses. “Assam and Darjeeling are fairly close together but they’re completely different teas; there’s so much to discover.”
Understanding the differences between teas has been hard-won knowledge.
“At the beginning it was difficult,” Twining admits. “You taste Chinese, Indian, Kenyan, Sri Lankan tea and you have to pick out the distinct origins. Then you have to pick out individual regions, getting more and more specific. At the start I would think ‘how on earth can you taste the difference?’ I didn’t think it would ever click but eventually I got it.”
How to become a master blender
Master blender is a much sought-after position. In order to have a cross-section of experience in the team, sometimes three to four years will pass without recruiting, then one or two blenders are taken on at a time (there are currently 10 master blenders, one senior blender, two blenders and two assistant blenders).
Over the course of a decade, the trainees come to know the intricacies not only of tea leaves but of every tea-buying market, too. From there, they can assist product development. Da Silva and Osmond recently helped create canned sparkling teas (“we spent a whole day debating how big the bubbles should be”, says Da Silva).
Product development takes anywhere between a year and three years, with 18,000 customer data points used to help refine exactly what people want. “You have to understand the ultimate objective of the product: should it be refreshing? Should it be comforting? Is it a morning drink or an afternoon drink?” suggests Da Silva.
Cups of tea, with the wet leaves left on the underside of the cup lid, are seen laid out in rows for tasting - Clara Molden
Equally important is what market it will launch in.
“A British black tea must be quite robust”, explains Osmond, because it is most commonly enjoyed with milk, which “delivers a different mouthfeel. By contrast, the French often drink theirs without milk so our development might include a lighter cup. Even though they’re both Earl Grey.”
With so many variables, is there such a thing as the perfect cup of tea? To come close, “there are two rules,” says Da Silva.
“First: you must freshly boil the water. If you don’t you’ve already lost some of the oxygen so the brewing won’t bring out all the flavour. Secondly, follow the instructions on the box. For every tea we work out the ideal brewing conditions: water temperature, the ratio of water to tea, how long you brew it for. A lot of time and energy is put into the instructions.”
For which these master blenders truly deserve a decent brew.
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The silver spoon
“This is quite ceremonial”, says Osmond. “We taste from a spoon to allow oxygen to be mixed in with the liquid, in order to assess it. When you’re promoted from assistant blender to blender, you’re gifted your own personal silver spoon with your initials on it.”
The silver spoon gifted to master blenders at Twinings is ceremonial, but they taste from spoons daily in order to assess each tea blend - Clara Molden
The spittoon
“We each drink 100 cups of tea a day”, explains Da Silva. “You couldn’t swallow all that otherwise you’d always be running to the toilet.”
The milk spoon
“We taste each tea with exactly 7.5ml of milk – no more, no less – so we use a special measuring spoon to get it exactly right”, Osmond says.
The porcelain tea set
“You’d be shocked if I told you how much these tea sets cost”, says Da Silva. “But they need to be exactly right and perfectly uniform, so that the heat dissipates at exactly the same rate. We also put tea-less cups filled with hot water at the end of each row, so they make sure the end cups don’t get cold.”
Hand scales
“Each tea we taste is measured out by hand to the perfect quantity, so all of the staff have a set of hand scales”, says Osmond.
A master blender’s essential tools including weighing scales, personalised spoon, milk spoon, a china cup to reflect the light and a personalised spittoon - Clara Molden
How a master blender describes tea
Each tea tasted by the master blenders is described precisely, using 95 specific words and phrases. Some of the qualities they look for include:
- Briskness – referring to what a consumer would perhaps describe as the liveliness and strength of a cup of tea
- Maltiness – sweet malt or caramel flavour notes that are characteristic of Assam black teas
- Muscatel – describes a characteristic reminiscent of sweet grapes. Often a descriptor used for peak-quality second flush Darjeeling teas.
- Thinness – how rich (or not) the flavour is.
- Brightness – a descriptor focusing on the colour. A bright cup of tea is more golden coloured. This is important as customers make judgments on tea before tasting it
- Viscosity – does it feel thick or thin on the tongue?
- Coarseness – the strength of the tea
- Astringency – specific to green teas, this term focuses on the bitterness or acidity of the drink
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