Country
Burundi
Burundi's entire tea industry is five factories strung along one mountain ridge, and for forty years a single state company bought and made all of it. The gardens are among the highest in Africa, on the Congo-Nile divide between roughly 1,700 and 2,500 m. Nearly all of the made tea is exported, so a country growing genuinely high-grown leaf drinks almost none of it.
What grows here
Black tea, effectively all of it, from five complexes running north to south along the divide: Buhoro, Rwegura, Teza, Ijenda and Tora. Teza and Rwegura are the oldest and the two names that travel. Each complex pairs a state-planted industrial block with village tea, family plots in the hills around the factory that supply most of the leaf. There is no second growing area and no second crop.
The ground
The Congo-Nile divide, the watershed ridge down western Burundi separating the Congo basin from the Nile. Gardens sit between roughly 1,700 and 2,500 m, cool, wet and high enough that Burundi's own tea office compares the leaf to Indian tea. Several blocks abut Kibira National Park, the montane rainforest along the same ridge, and further tea planting into that forest is currently contested.
How it is made here
CTC in five state-built factories, and the thing to understand is that until recently there was no maker to choose between. The Burundi Tea Office bought every kilogram of green leaf in the country and made every kilogram of tea, from 1971 until a private competitor, PROTHEM, opened a factory at Gisozi in Mwaro province in 2011. The two have been in open dispute over who may buy from which growers ever since, and there is still no independent regulator for the industry.
What to look for
The factory name is the only provenance Burundi has, and most of the crop never carries it: the leaf goes into East African blends pooled with Rwandan tea grown on the same ridge a few kilometres away. The country's own assessment is the useful one. Burundi has the altitude and the climate for a high-end tea and does not reliably deliver one, because quality varies year to year and grower to grower. Judge the lot, not the origin.
How it got here
Tea has been grown on the Congo-Nile ridge since 1931, but the industry proper begins with trials at the Gisozi research station in 1963 and large-scale planting after independence. Teza, Rwegura and Tora were built first, Ijenda and Buhoro followed and the last of the five was finished in 1992, with village plots added around them from 1969. The Burundi Tea Office was created by decree in 1971 and given the whole crop. The war that began in 1993 cut the planted area, Teza worst of all, with bushes burned and blocks left to go wild. A 2013 law listed the office for privatisation, which has not happened.
Places in Burundi
Named places inside Burundi. The ones with a page of their own are links.