Country
Sri Lanka
Sri Lanka is the country that turned altitude into a grading system. Everything it makes is classified as low, mid or high grown, and that band tells you more about the cup than the estate name does. It is also the world's largest producer of orthodox black tea, one of the few big producers that never converted wholesale to CTC, which is why so much affordable orthodox leaf comes from here.
What grows here
Orthodox black tea, overwhelmingly, divided into seven recognised growing regions. Nuwara Eliya, Uva, Dimbula and Uda Pussellawa are the high-grown names, light and brisk and aromatic; Kandy sits in the middle; Ruhuna and Sabaragamuwa in the south are low-grown, dark, heavy and largely destined for markets that want strength. Small quantities of green tea and of silver-tip white tea are made as well. The white is a modern specialty rather than an inherited one, and the volume is genuinely tiny: unopened buds are scarce in fields planted for black tea, so a picker spends a long time finding them.
The ground
The central massif does everything. Low grown means up to about 600 m, mid grown to about 1,200 m and high grown above that, and the character shifts predictably as you climb: heavier and darker at the bottom, lighter and more perfumed at the top. The subtlety is the monsoons. Two of them arrive from opposite directions at opposite times of year, so the dry, quality-making season on the eastern slopes at Uva falls months apart from the one on the western slopes at Dimbula.
The bushes
The plantings are assamica-derived, descended from the seedling stock that replaced coffee, with a long programme of numbered clones from the national Tea Research Institute layered on top over the last century. Cultivar is not how this tea is sold, and a Sri Lankan estate will talk about elevation, region and season long before it talks about which bush. That is a reasonable reflection of reality here, where the elevation band really does dominate the flavour.
Harvest seasons
Picking runs all year, which is unusual and is the practical advantage of being close to the equator. What matters instead is each region's quality season, driven by which monsoon is drying which slope. Uva's window falls around July to September, when the dry wind off the eastern hills produces the region's distinctive sharp, minty character. Dimbula and Nuwara Eliya peak in the northern winter, around January to March. Everything else in the year is ordinary tea from the same fields.
How it is made here
Orthodox rolling is the norm, and almost everything is sold by leaf grade: OP, BOP, FBOP and the rest, called and catalogued lot by lot at the Colombo auction. The grades describe leaf size, wholeness and tip content, not quality, and their real function is to predict how fast a tea will brew. Sri Lanka also runs the lion-marked origin scheme, which requires that a tea be grown in the country and packed there before it can carry the mark.
What to look for
'Ceylon' on its own is a country and nothing more, and it covers teas that have almost nothing in common. The region and the elevation class carry the actual information, and a season adds more. The lion logo is a genuine origin guarantee rather than a decoration, so it is worth noticing. Be aware also that yields took a serious hit after the abrupt 2021 ban on imported agrochemicals, which was reversed within months but disrupted supply and pricing well beyond that year.
How it got here
Sri Lanka's tea industry exists because its coffee industry died: leaf rust destroyed the plantations from the late 1860s, and planters replaced coffee with tea, starting with James Taylor at Loolecondera in 1867. The estates were worked from the start by Tamil labour brought from southern India, and their position is still unresolved: the 1948 citizenship laws left most of them stateless, a 1964 pact repatriated hundreds of thousands, and full citizenship came only in 2003. Their descendants still pick the crop and are among the poorest people in the country. Lipton bought estates here in the 1890s, and the industry was nationalised in 1975 before returning to private management.
Places in Sri Lanka
Named places inside Sri Lanka. The ones with a page of their own are links.
Styles from Sri Lanka
Tea styles tied to Sri Lanka or to somewhere inside it.