First Flush
Pale liquor, green-almond and white flowers — brisk, light-bodied, gone before you expect it to be.
SFTGFOP1 · plucked early March
₹1,850
/100g
Grown in the shadow of Kanchenjunga.
Singalila Estate — Darjeeling, 2,100m
The four teas
One garden, one year, four pickings. Each flush is bagged the week it is withered and never blended with another estate's leaf.
Second Flush
The muscatel flush, the one the estate's whole year is measured by. Amber cup, honeyed grape, a warmth that sits at the back of the tongue.
FTGFOP1 · plucked early June
₹2,400
/100g
Monsoon Flush
Deeper-bodied and malty, the everyday cup of the estate — good with milk, better without.
TGFOP · plucked late July
₹950
/100g
Autumn Flush
Copper liquor, nutty and round, the last picking before the bushes rest through winter.
FTGFOP1 · plucked early November
₹1,650
/100g
Three generations, one slope.
In 1962, Ranajit Basu planted the first bushes on this ridge, eight hundred metres above the valley floor and close enough to Kanchenjunga to watch its shadow move across the gardens each morning. His granddaughter, Ipsita, now walks the same rows.
A decade ago she stopped the estate's chemical sprays outright — two thin, uncertain years before the soil found its own balance again. What grows here now is fed by nothing but compost, shade trees and the mist that sits in the valley until mid-morning.
Every leaf is still plucked by hand, two leaves and a bud, by the same families who have worked this hillside for three generations of Basus.
Pickers, eastern slope
Second flush, June
What our drinkers say
The second flush arrives every June like a letter I have been waiting for. That muscatel note is unlike anything else in my cupboard.
I have bought from three Darjeeling estates over the years. This is the only one that still tastes like where it is from.
Small batches, clearly labelled, and it actually arrives the week they say it will. Rare in this trade.
The next flush is still on the bush.
First flush picking begins in March. We write once, the week each flush ships — never more than that.