It was in the heart of the mists of Ceylon, where the hills are covered in an almost liquid green, that the Kenilworth plantation was born in 1880. Its British founders, heirs to an empire in search of renewal, gave it the name of a castle in Warwickshire (Kenilworth Castle) as if to transplant, in the center of the island, a breath of English nobility.
But before it was a tea estate, Kenilworth was a coffee estate. For over half a century, the whole of Sri Lanka lived to the rhythm of the coffee harvests, until coffee rust (Hemileia vastatrix) decimated the plantations. In just a few years, the mountains of Ceylon lost their brown gold, and the British planters had to reinvent themselves. It was then that a visionary Scotsman, James Taylor, planted the first tea plants at Loolecondera in 1867.
It was a silent revolution: where the coffee trees had died out, tea took root. In less than a generation, the island was covered with verdant gardens, including Kenilworth, born from the ashes of coffee at the turn of the century.
Nestled between the mighty arms of the Kelani Ganga and Mahaweli Ganga rivers, at an altitude of 640 meters, Kenilworth stretches out in the cool mid-altitude climate. Neither too high nor too low, this mid-grown terroir embodies the art of balance: a temperate climate, consistent humidity, and mists that caress the leaves at dawn. Here, it rains nearly two hundred days a year, as the two monsoons, from the southwest and the northeast, converge and interact. This interplay of water and wind gives the tea its brilliant, coppery liquor, sometimes with a hint of ripe fruit.
Kenilworth is not a garden, but a living mosaic, composed of five divisions, each a different facet of the same terroir. In the Black Stone division, a small colonial dam still feeds a micro-hydroelectric plant, a vestige of a time when modernity ventured into the jungle. Higher up, in the Gniessrock section, grows a unique clone born from the research of the Tea Research Institute: proof that Kenilworth cultivates the memory of the past while embracing the future.
On a clear day, from the heights of the factory, one can glimpse in the distance the sacred silhouette of Adam's Peak, a mountain of pilgrimage and legend. Kenilworth, too, is a place of passage: from one world to another, from coffee to tea, from colony to culture, from tradition to consciousness. Each leaf tells of this dual heritage, that of industrial England and timeless Sri Lanka, a dialogue of rivers and mists, which is found, intact, in the coppery warmth of a fine porcelain cup.
