KTDA plans to diversify to orthodox tea to cushion farmers from low prices even as growers and politicians decry the meager bonus payments for this year.

The diversification by KTDA to orthodox tea production is meant to capture the world market for specialty tea and increase income for farmers.

But how is orthodox tea processed?

According to Festus Kaburi, the operations manager at Gatugi Tea Factory in Nyeri, specialty tea at KTDA the difference between orthodox and black tea technically known as Cut Tear and Curling (CTC) is only in the different ways of processing.

This means for factories to produce black tea and orthodox tea, they have to encompass two parallel processing lines for the two types of tea with one processing black tea and the other orthodox tea.

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But the raw material is the same. At the farm level, farmers grow and harvest their tea as usual and deliver to the factory which decides what will go for orthodox and black tea lines.

Farmers are supposed to harvest two leaves and a bud so as to get quality tea.

“Growing of the raw material is the same and is even harvested the same way but the difference comes in processing,” he clarifies.

“For orthodox, the first stage of weathering involves reducing the moisture from over 80 percent to between 50 to 55 percent as compared to black tea where moisture content is brought down to an average of 65 percent,” says Kaburi.

From weathering, the next key stage for orthodox, which is very different from black tea, is that the tea goes for rolling on rolling tables where the rolling process takes place.

The purpose of rolling is to get a certain style of the leaf appearance at the final product and to squeeze the juice which is very important in the next stage of fermentation.

While in the orthodox line the tea leaf is rolled, in black tea it involves cutting, tearing and curling as the name suggests.

Orthodox tea is rolled ensuring that the leaf is not cut but remains wholly throughout the process.

The rolling of orthodox is done in batches meaning one rolling table is fed at a time then rolls the leaves for 30 minutes. The tea is then discharged to another machine which is called the rolling breaker whose purpose is to remove pieces or shoots that were broken into smaller sizes.

The rolling breaker separates the smaller particles from the big ones.

The smaller ones known as the fines proceeds to fermentation while the bigger ones go to the second and third rolling.

“We do a maximum of three rolling and all the small process go to the CFU which is a continuous fermenting machine,” explains Kaburi.

Ones taken back are handled separately but also go for fermentation.

The fermentation of orthodox is similar to black tea but the only difference is that it takes a bit longer.

While in black tea fermentation is done for one and a half hours, in orthodox the leaves can be fermented even in three to six hours depending on the ambient conditions.

But the process is the same where oxygen is brought in, where oxidation takes place.

This helps get the needed quality by controlling the temperature in the area, humidity and time.

“You ensure that you have made the quality attributes you want, which physically will also be demonstrated by the change of colour from green at the rolling table to golden brown at the end of the fermentation process,” he adds.

The fermentation process is then arrested by taking the tea to the drier.

For orthodox tea, a different drier is used called a chain drier where the tea goes into a moving chain and it is subjected to a hot blast of about 110 degrees centigrade.

The purpose of drying is to arrest the fermentation by removing the moisture from the 50 to 55 attained earlier to 3.2 to 3.5 percent at the end of drying.

The other reason is to increase the shelf life of the tea. This is because when the tea is at higher moisture content the quality deteriorates fast.

“After doing the drying to 3.2 percent, the next stage is grading otherwise from drier the tea is ready for consumption,” says Kaburu.

“Grading is purposely done to grade the tea to the grades depending on which markets you are taking. In KTDA today, we are grading the tea into seven grades as compared to black tea where we normally make four primary grades.”

Grading is done using a different machine where stalk and any other particle that is not tea is removed using a machine called a colour sorter capable of removing anything that is not black.

Then from that stage, the tea is ready for the market. KTDA has turned to orthodox tea production to be able to penetrate the market that wants orthodox but does not take black tea. The agency will also be able to reach markets that take both black tea and orthodox.

This is because the prices for BLACK TEA are fluctuating and currently, are at their lowest while that of orthodox has been high and stable for a long period of time.

The agency targets to have ten factories doing orthodox tea by the end of the year processing a total of 30 million kilos of green leaf.

Currently, there are over 200 million kilos of black tea being overproduced yearly in the world and therefore the need to diversify to other products.