Chai time: tasting the brews at Ahmad Tea
South East Business Insider visits the Hampshire tea company that has just won a King's Award for its global sustainability programmes and witnesses the testing - and tasting - process.
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00:00Hi there, my name's Dominic. I'm a tea taster here at the Armity UK head office, and you
00:15can see what we're doing here today. We're tasting lost tea, which is actually what we
00:19do every day. We're in the middle of tasting the Kenyan auction, and we're doing the final
00:26selections here, choosing the best teas that we want to buy for our blends. And what sort
00:32of thing does the process entail, Dominic? So we brew, you can see my colleague Sarah,
00:38she's getting the batch ready at the end there. So she gets every tea ready in the same way,
00:44so each tea is weighed at two and a half grams and brewed for five minutes, and that makes
00:48a very, very strong cup of tea. It's about twice the strength that you would typically
00:53drink tea. So that's so we can really assess the full flavour, get the full characteristics.
01:00We then look at the leaf. We can tell a lot about the size and the style, and start to tell about
01:06the quality from looking at the leaf appearance. We then look here at the infusion. For a black
01:13tea like this, we're looking for a nice, even, bright, coppery infusion. Again, that's giving
01:18us a good indication about the quality, the weather, how well the tea's been manufactured,
01:23things like that. Colour, depth of colour in the liquor, and of course the most important thing is
01:29the taste. Hello, my name is Zahra Afshar, and I'm Head of Legal and Sustainability at Ahmeti.
01:41We are thrilled to have won the King's Award. It's a great honour, especially to be recognised
01:47for the hard work that all of us have really been dedicated to in giving back to communities,
01:53not just in the UK, but also in the places that we source, so in India, Sri Lanka, and East Africa,
02:01and moreover, the way that we work with our distributors in over 90 countries. We invest
02:06also in local charities with them. Can you give us an example of a recent programme that you've
02:12introduced? Recently, we've been working in a very focused way with women in tea, especially
02:19the women that pick our tea. We've been supporting female-focused nutrition programmes, health
02:27programmes, just to ensure that they really are getting the best care in the gardens that they
02:36live in.