Britain at Work
A Pictorial Description of Our National Industries

THE PREPARATION OF TEA AND COFFEE 3*3 The tea being bought, it is delivered as required against payment of the duty, and is removed to the factory to be blended and packed. A typical leaf twig bears about seven leaves, varying in length from a fraction of an inch to four inches. Each leaf has its own name, the terms commonly used being- flowery pekoe, orange pekoe, pekoe, pekoe souchong, souchong, and congou. If the seventh and largest leaf were plucked, as it sometimes is in the case of China teas, it would be called bohea. In practice, however, the leaves are not plucked separately, but are grouped together for the purpose of drying, and are then passed through a series of sieves, which classify them once more according to size. Each grocer has his own peculiarities, according to the tastes of his customers, and long experience is required for the task of producing blends to suit the pocket and the palate of different classes of the community. The larger leaves, more- over, have to be passed through a cutting mill, in order to be reduced to a size that will mix well with the smaller sorts, and produce an agreeable impression 40 to the eye. When, therefore, an order is received for a particular customer, a formula is prepared, with the aid of the tasting samples, and its component parts, which read upon the slip like a doctor’s prescrip- tion, are taken out of stock and passed into the sifter. 1 his is an ingenious contrivance whose most curious feature is a battery of magnets, which seize the nails, fragments of hoop iron, and other pieces of metal that have found their way into the chest through the carelessness of coolies on the plantations or of packers in the dock warehouses. With the aid of a 2 h.p. mill a deft factory girl can manipulate twenty chests, or a ton of tea, every hour. From this machine the tea is conveyed into a rotary blender, wherein it is rotated at a slow speed, and in the course of ten minutes the blending has been performed so thoroughly that if put up into ounce packets each packet will contain a due proportion of each constituent. At this stage a pound sample is drawn for the purpose of tasting, and if the result should not reach the expectation of the expert other sorts are added and the whole reblended, until a perfect tea is produced. For delivery in bulk the mixture is now passed through a funnel and repacked in the original chests, sometimes pressed down by hand labour. A recent device, however, enables the tea