An Interview with Teamaker Balazs Henger

The 2026 tea harvest ran a month late, nearly start to finish. A dry winter followed by a deluge of rain created a tricky environment for the tea bushes of Northern India. In the spring, the Darjeeling teas we wait all winter for were delayed, and the Assams followed suit in the heat of summer. Tea is agriculture, after all, and no two harvests are ever quite the same. Weather sets the pace; our job is to listen, taste and respond.

Second Flush Assam is our whole reason for being each summer. It's the backbone of rich blends like British Brunch and Portland Breakfast, and we build our entire buying calendar around it. For generations of American tea drinkers, robust black teas like Assam have helped define what a satisfying morning cup tastes like: deep, malty, full-bodied and strong enough to welcome milk. At Smith, that tradition is something we both inherit and continually reinterpret.

Normally we'd see the Second Flush running May through July. This year it sauntered in closer to June, and as I write this on August 25, we're still finding lovely lots crossing the cupping table. That's not just late. That's fashionably, almost defiantly late.

We're fortunate to have partnerships spanning the length of the Brahmaputra River. The heavy majority of our teas come from the South Bank, with a few from the North Bank, and that mix gives our portfolio diversity in both flavor and timing. It extends our buying season and lets us be more selective about the lots we bring home.

And “lots” is an important word here. A tea lot is a specific, traceable batch of tea made at a particular garden and moment in the harvest. Like a vintage of wine, each lot carries the imprint of its place, weather, timing and manufacture.

Buying single lots is one of the core principles behind Smith Teamaker and one of the things that sets us apart. Many tea blenders buy what the trade calls “blended standards” — pre-combined teas designed to deliver a predetermined, consistent flavor profile and make blending more predictable. We prefer the flexibility and creativity that single lots afford us, which makes finding the right teas at the right time paramount to our success.

It is the harder way to buy tea, but we believe it is the more interesting one. Instead of asking a supplier to make the tea fit our formula, we taste individual lots and build the formula ourselves. Because tea changes every year, consistency at Smith does not mean buying the same thing again and again. It means using experience, memory and a lot of tasting to create a cup that feels unmistakably Smith.

If this season had a highlight reel, it would be mid-July's Orthodox teas. “Orthodox” refers to tea made using traditional methods that preserve more of the leaf's natural structure as it is rolled, oxidized and dried. Compared with highly mechanized commodity-tea production, Orthodox manufacture can yield greater nuance, texture and character in the finished cup.

Rich, malty, thick in the mouth and quietly sweet, these are the kind of teas that make you sit up a little straighter at the cupping table. These are the leaves that will carry British Brunch into its best year yet. They are also a reminder of why we make blends the way we do: not to erase the individuality of great teas, but to bring several distinct voices together into something balanced, enduring and entirely our own.

As the season wraps up and we put our cupping sets away, we reflect on how long and arduous it was. Each day our cupping team tasted through between 50 and 200 samples, looking for the perfect fits for our catalog. It's a highly caffeinated job, and the four of us lucky enough to sit at the cupping table take it seriously.

We know the teas we choose in the summer heat will shape our blends for the next year, and the magnitude of that is never lost on us. Neither is the special nature of the work.