Country
Kenya
Kenya is the world's largest exporter of black tea and the origin most people drink without ever being told. It is also the least seasonal of the major producers: on the equator at high altitude the bushes never go dormant, so there is no flush, no spring rush and no vintage, only a plucking round every week or two, all year. Nearly the whole crop is CTC, sold through the Mombasa auction and blended into other people's brands.
What grows here
Black CTC, overwhelmingly, from the highlands on both sides of the Rift Valley. Kericho is the largest producing county and the home of the big estates, with the Nandi Hills holding more of the same. Nyeri, Murang'a, Kiambu and the Mount Kenya slopes to the east are smallholder country, cooler and higher. A small orthodox trade runs alongside it and is where the specialty output comes from: whole-leaf black, some green and white, plus purple tea from a cultivar bred locally for its anthocyanin content.
The ground
Volcanic red soils at altitude on the equator, mostly above 1,500 m and in places well beyond 2,000 m, with reliable rain and no winter. That combination gives some of the highest yields per hectare anywhere and lets picking run every week of the year. It also explains the cup: fast growth, bright coppery liquor, brisk and thick rather than layered, which is exactly what the blending trade is buying.
The bushes
Assamica clones, selected locally for yield and for hardiness at altitude and propagated as cuttings rather than grown from seed. Kenya's tea research station has been releasing numbered clones for decades, and the one with a name outside the trade is TRFK 306/1, the purple cultivar, released for commercial planting in 2011, whose leaf carries enough anthocyanin to look purple in the field. It was promoted as a way for growers to escape the commodity price of CTC, and the tea made from it is still finding its style.
Harvest seasons
Year round, with peaks that follow the rains rather than any calendar of flushes: the long rains and the short rains each bring a surge in volume, so the heaviest cropping falls roughly March to June and October to December. Nothing in the Kenyan market is sold by season, so a date on a packet is about freshness rather than about a vintage.
How it is made here
CTC, at scale, and the scale is the point. Smallholder leaf, much of it off plots of an acre or less, is hand-plucked and then macerated through toothed rollers into hard granules that brew fast and strong. Hand-plucking feeding an industrial process surprises people who assume CTC implies machine harvest, though the big estates have mechanised. The orthodox minority runs a conventional rolling line instead, and that is what you are buying whenever a Kenyan tea is sold as whole leaf.
What to look for
Most Kenyan tea is sold as an ingredient, so the useful questions are which factory and whether it is CTC or orthodox, not which region. Factory names do travel, Milima and Kangaita among them, and the smallholder factories run by the Kenya Tea Development Agency are identified by name at auction, so provenance exists if a seller bothers to pass it on. Purple tea is the current marketing story and is often sold with health claims that run well ahead of the evidence; judge it as tea.
How it got here
Tea arrived in 1903 as an experimental planting and became a commercial crop from the 1920s, laid out as a settler estate industry in the highlands. What made Kenya what it is came after independence, when smallholder growing was organised into a national system that gave hundreds of thousands of one-acre farmers a factory to sell to. That structure, rather than any estate or any garden, is why Kenya out-produces countries with far longer tea histories.
Places in Kenya
Named places inside Kenya. The ones with a page of their own are links.