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Approximately 90% of the tea drunk in Britain is known as the popular brand leading blends - the type of tea that you can buy in most supermarkets and shops. These are a blend of teas which contain up to 35 different teas and remain constant in quality, character and flavour, despite some teas being seasonal or in short supply due to adverse weather conditions in one or other of the growing regions. Each popular blend has its own recipe and that recipe is the company's trade secret. Some of the popular brand leading blends are blended to cope with the varying types of water in Britain be they soft or hard.

It is the job of the tea blender - a tea taster of many years standing - to ensure that his company blend meets all the criteria. To do this, the blenders and buyers - all tea tasters - will taste the teas brought at auction on arrival at the tea-packaging factory, to reassess that they have not been contaminated or damaged whilst in the warehouses awaiting the auction.

During the course of a day, a Taster can sample between 200-1000 teas, adjusting his recipe to ensure that the company's brand remains constant. The blender's findings are fed into a computer and the requisite numbers of sacks and chests of the different teas are taken from the company storeroom, opened and conveyed into a large blending drum. This rotates, mixing all the teas together. When the blending is complete, the blend is ready for packaging into packets or tea bags.

It takes at least five years to train as a tea taster and then it can be a continuous learning process. In order to prepare teas for tasting the dry leaves (carefully weighed) are laid out in containers on the tasting bench. Boiling water is poured and on and the brewing is carefully timed for 5 -6 minutes. The brewed tea is then poured into tasting bowls, and the infused leaf is tipped onto the lid of the brewing mug. The taster slurps the tea much as a wine taster does, then rolls the liquid around his mouth to assess the flavour before spitting it out into a spittoon. The taster also takes into account the appearance of the dry leaf, the infused leaf and the colour and quality of the liquor.

http://www.tea.co.uk/tea-processing-and-blending