Country
Indonesia
Indonesia is a top-ten producer whose tea is almost invisible: a Dutch colonial plantation industry, rebuilt after independence, that sells most of its crop into blends or drinks it at home as jasmine-scented green tea and bottled iced tea. What shapes it is the volcanoes: the gardens sit on the flanks of active ones, in deep ash soils, at elevations that would count as high grown anywhere else.
What grows here
Black tea above all, from two places that have little in common. West Java, the Preanger highlands south of Bandung and the hills around Bogor, is the historic quality area and makes orthodox black on estates laid out in the colonial period. North Sumatra, inland of Medan along the Bukit Barisan, is CTC country supplying blenders and the teabag trade. Green tea is made in quantity for the domestic market, most of it scented with jasmine, and a small number of producers make oolong, white and specialty black for export.
The ground
Equatorial, so there is no dormant season and picking never stops, with altitude doing the work that latitude does elsewhere. The Java gardens sit roughly between 700 and 1,500 m on volcanic andosols, deep, dark and free-draining, under heavy rainfall and near-daily afternoon cloud. The equatorial trade-off applies here as it does in Kenya: constant growth, high yields and a leaf that is rarely as concentrated as one from a place that gets a winter.
The bushes
Assamica, which was the second attempt. Chinese sinensis seed was planted first and failed in the tropical climate, and assamica replaced it in the middle of the nineteenth century, which is a large part of why Indonesian tea tastes the way it does. Modern planting is clonal, mostly the GMB series from the Research Institute for Tea and Cinchona at Gambung in West Java, which has bred the two crops side by side since the colonial economy depended on both.
Harvest seasons
Year round, in continuous plucking rounds, with no flush and nothing sold by vintage. The drier months around July to September are generally reckoned to give the better leaf and are the closest thing Indonesia has to a season. Wet-season crop is bulkier and thinner, and it is most of the year.
How it is made here
Orthodox rolling on Java, CTC in North Sumatra and, behind both, a jasmine-scenting trade that export buyers rarely see: green tea layered with jasmine blossom much as Fujian does it, made and drunk locally in volumes that dwarf the specialty export business. Indonesia's bottled tea industry is large enough to shape what gets grown, because a drinks factory wants consistent scented green tea by the tonne rather than character by the kilo.
What to look for
Java and Sumatra are different products and a label rarely says which one you have. Ask for the estate: the West Java plantations have names and histories, and an estate name is the most reliable indicator that a tea was made orthodox rather than as CTC. Indonesian black is usually sold anonymously as a component of breakfast blends, which means the honest, named version tends to be cheaper than its quality suggests.
How it got here
The Dutch planted Chinese seed in 1684 and it failed. Assamica planted from the mid-nineteenth century did not, and Java black tea became a serious part of the world trade by the early twentieth century. The Japanese occupation and the war that followed wrecked the estates, and the gardens went unrestored for decades until a government revitalisation programme from the late 1980s brought much of the area back into production. The estates that survived are the ones on the best ground in West Java, which is why the quality and the history sit in the same place.
Places in Indonesia
Named places inside Indonesia. The ones with a page of their own are links.