Tagged: colombo
The London Tea Auction's Priciest Sale Was Also Its Last
On 29 June 1998, a Ceylon Flowery Pekoe from a small Sri Lankan garden fetched the highest price the 319-year-old London tea auction had ever recorded, on the same day the sale closed for good. A 2025 Guinness record for a different charity tea sale shows the pattern was not a one-off.
Why a Screen Never Replaced the Tea Broker
A licensed broker still takes roughly one percent of a tea auction's value for cataloguing, tasting, and vouching for a lot no algorithm grades, and one century-old exchange has brought its old open-outcry room back after going fully digital. Here is what the commission buys, and why regulators keep steering trade through it.
Kenya's Tea Farmers Took Home Less in a Year the Shilling Got Stronger
A tea garden is paid in its own currency for a crop sold against the US dollar, so the exchange rate can move a season's income more than the harvest does. Kenya and India lived through opposite versions of that mechanism in the same year.
The Tea Auctions
How tea is priced and sold. The canonical reference on the world's tea auctions: how a sale actually works, the major centres at Mombasa, Colombo, and across India, the move from the outcry floor to the screen, and what an auction price really means.