Tagged: clone
TV1 to TV31: The Clones That Built Modern Assam
Almost no Assam garden grows tea from seed anymore. Since 1949, Tocklai's breeding station has released a numbered line of clones, TV1 to TV31, and they now cover most of the valley. Here is what a clone is, why the industry switched, and what got lost along the way.
The Third Way to Plant an Assam Tea Bush
Not every Assam bush is a clone or a seedling. A third category, the biclonal seed variety, crosses two proven clones on purpose and plants the resulting seed. Here is how it works and why Tocklai still makes it.
Assam Grew the Purple Tea Everyone Else Is Selling
Kenya built a global purple tea business on a clone traced back to Assam tea plants exported early last century. Assam itself still has no commercial purple tea plant, only wild finds in Karbi Anglong and a germplasm bank holding the chemistry that could change that.
Assam Tea Has a Third Parent Most Drinkers Never Hear About
Cambod tea, a third botanical type shipped in from Indochina in 1917, sits behind clones like TV23 and the theaflavin-rich color in the cup, work usually credited to the China and Assam types alone.
Clones and Cultivars
Every named plant in an Assam garden carries a code, TV1, TS 397, TTRI 2, or a garden's own name and a number. The complete reference to what those codes mean, the categories Tocklai sorts its releases into, and how a candidate plant becomes a released clone at all.
Manohari Gold Tea
An ultra-premium, small-batch orthodox tea from one Assam garden, hand-plucked 25 to 50 grams a day and sold at record prices. What it is, how it is made, and the full auction record, set out plainly.
The Tocklai Institute
The complete record of the Tocklai Tea Research Institute at Jorhat, the world's oldest tea research station and the office behind nearly every clone, pest study, and quality benchmark this office has ever certified. How a single chemist's post in 1891 became a formal station in 1911, what its eleven divisions do, and the science it has produced since.