Cream scalloped bowls, set of six
Six deep bowls with a scalloped rim and forty years of wear along the edge.
$30
Kosgoda garden black tea
$32
Low-grown leaf from a slope behind one house, rolled by hand the day it was picked.
Materials & dimensions
- Hand-rolled black tea, 250g
- Food-safe steel tin
11 × 7 × 11 cm · 420 g
Care
Keep the tin closed and away from the spice shelf — tea takes on whatever is next to it. Brew at a full boil for three to four minutes. It will stand a fourth minute; it will not stand a sixth.
Shipping & duties
Standard $39
Express $74.10
North America · 420 g
Free standard shipping over $250.
Import duties and taxes are set by United States, not by us. They are not included above, and your carrier collects them on delivery.
The story
Almost all Ceylon tea comes off an estate. This does not. It comes off a stand of about four hundred bushes on the slope behind Chandra Kumari's house at Kosgoda, forty metres above sea level and close enough to the coast that the leaf carries salt.
Low-grown tea is the island's least fashionable category and its most forgiving. The heat pushes the bush hard, the leaf comes thick, and the result is dark, malty and strong enough to take milk without disappearing — the tea people in Sri Lanka actually drink, rather than the pale high-grown leaf that gets exported to people who want it to taste like a hillside.
It is plucked, withered overnight on racks in the roof space, rolled by hand the next morning, oxidised on trays until it goes the colour of a wet brick, and fired over the wood stove. Two kilos a month, when the weather agrees. This is 250 grams of it.
Chandra Kumari
Kosgoda, Southern Province · working since 1997
