How do I become …MoneyA thirst for travel, good practical and communication skills and five years of taste training are part of the craft of a cuppaIt was described, in a recent advertisement, as “the best job in the country, but one that few know exists”. Successful applicants would travel the world from India to Argentina and their primary function would be to drink tea.
Tea tasting is an art as rarefied as whisky blending or wine connoisseurship, but even the humblest supermarket teabag is the result of hours of expert sipping, grading and blending. “Tea is a natural crop and so taste and quality can vary,” says Giles Oakley, a tea taster and buyer with Tetley. “Sometimes harvests in one area can be scarce so you have to change the source and recipe of the leaves and the skill of the taster and blender ensures that this doesn’t alter the taste of a brand.”
In rooms resembling science labs, tasters move along several dozen tea samples, slurping the liquid from a spoon to ensure it hits all the taste buds at high speed, then expelling it into a wheeled spittoon. Some of the samples will be from shipments that the company has not yet bid for and wants to try out; others from lots that it has already committed to buying and needs to grade for the British palate.
“Tetley has five offices across India and Africa and staff there will taste the individual lots before an auction then we in the UK taste bulk lots to decide which will blend well together,” says Oakley. “The trickiest part is relating what you’re tasting in the office to the practical demands in the factory – tea destined for teabags, for instance, has to physically fit into a small sachet so you can’t buy wiry, curly leaves for that, whereas when you’re tasting for Indian brands you have to think of the visual attributes of the crop because Indians don’t tend to use tea bags and are therefore much more in touch with the leaves.”
It takes five years to train a palate to identify, blindfold, the origin and blend of each sample and an expert is expected to be able to detect not only the country that produced a certain batch, but the region. A background in botany or science is useful but unnecessary – what’s crucial, according to Oakley, is a good head for numbers and interpersonal skills. He was a philosophy graduate with no clear ambition when he saw an advert for a trainee tea taster at Tetley. “It said applicants must be able to travel the world,” he says. “I had spent a year as an English language teacher in Indonesia and Dubai, which had given me the travel bug, and I liked the thought of becoming an expert in something so integral to everyday life.”
Oakley was one of several hundred applicants for the post. During a full day of tests and group exercises, his presentation, analytical and interaction skills were scrutinised and his vision probed with colour-blindness challenges since tasters must be able to distinguish the differing colours as well as the flavours of tea leaves. His philosophy training proved, he says, an unexpected advantage. “There are a couple of philosophers in our department – the subject challenges you to think beyond boundaries and question assumptions which are useful attributes in the competitive world of tea auctions.”
New recruits on a starting salary of around £25,000 spend their first months sipping their way through hundreds of spoonfuls of tea a day under the eye of a supervisor, memorising the names and groups of leaves and mastering the bespoke language used by different tea companies to describe them. Imbibing is only a small part of the job, however. In order to balance what they taste with the realities of the market, trainees have to understand the full process of the tea trade from crop planting to the supermarket shelves. They are drilled in presenting market reports at the weekly buying meetings in which that week’s purchases are recited and forecasts for future prices, availability and demand discussed. Then, after detailed courses on blending different varieties to suit public demand, comes a lengthy training trip overseas to study the manufacturing process and how tea is bought and sold and to meet the network of traders that they will ultimately do business with.
“The first experience of a tea auction is terrifying because you are spending vast sums of money with the nod of your head,” says Oakley. “It’s essential to have stamina because you always get pushed around a bit on your first few visits.”
Oakley relied on budget tea bags before his induction into gourmet blends and, like most of the British population, he had little contact with the ingredients of his daily brew. The subtlety, texture and infinite variety of tea that makes tasting such an art were a revelation, as was the passion invested in a drink that’s so much taken for granted. The most memorable revelation of his career occurred, he says, at a tea factory in Darjeeling. “The first production of the season is worth a lot simply because it’s the first – like in the old days when the clipper ships raced each other to get the first consignment of tea to England,” he says. “I got up in the middle of the night to watch this first batch of leaves be completed and the pride which the factory manager took in it was something I’d never experienced before. He was nurturing it like a child.”
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