Ceylon Uva Highland Black Tea

Uva is a remote tea district in the southeastern hills of Sri Lanka, best known for its July to September quality season. The cup is aromatic and mellow, with a cool wintergreen edge and a brisk finish. Brewed in a teapot at 95°C.

Origin & Story

Uva is Sri Lanka's remote tea district, on the southeastern slopes of the central hills around Badulla. Both the northeast and the southwest monsoon reach it, and from July to September the southwest monsoon arrives as a dry wind, having shed its rain on the hills it crossed. That is Uva's quality season, and it is when the district's best-known teas are made.

Tea sellers call the wind cachan and say the stress of it drives the bushes to make more aromatic oils. Whatever the cause, a well-made Uva from the season carries a cool, mentholated wintergreen note, with a mellow, smooth body under it. The Sri Lanka Tea Board describes the character as exotically aromatic and easy to tell apart once you have tasted it.

Uva came to tea later than the central hills, and much of its fame comes from Thomas Lipton, the Victorian tea magnate, who owned estates in the district, among them Dambatenne, near Haputale, and used Uva tea to help build tea drinking in America.

Sri Lanka itself began growing tea in 1867, when James Taylor planted the first bushes, and the industry grew fast after coffee leaf rust destroyed the island's coffee plantations from 1869.

Use water at about 95°C and 3 g of leaf for 240 ml, steep for three to four minutes in a teapot, and taste the first cup plain to find the wintergreen.

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