Mackwood Tea Gardens

Mackwood Tea Gardens

Mackwood Tea Gardens

Mackwood Tea Gardens

Mackwood Tea Museum & Factory

Mackwood Tea Gardens Cafe

Mackwood Tea Museum & Factory

Mackwood Tea Gardens Cafe – Interior

Packed Tea

Tea tastings at their cafe

On our Sri Lanka trip, we specially went to Nuwara Elliya to visit the beautiful tea gardens and Mackwoods tea factory. We are huge tea lovers and if we would have missed this, we would have felt very guilty.
So after a nights stay at Kandy, the next morning we drove to the chilly Nuwara Elliya. It’s a fairly beautiful place with small hills adding to its scenic beauty. We reached there around noon and it was cloudy with slight patches of rain. After climbing down the stairs (big risers) we walked through the gardens, took photos and admired this beautiful crop (we have this association with tea 🙂 ). Later, on our request one of the staff members at the museum took us to an introductory visit to the factory inside where they showed us the process and explained how the leaves are picked, crushed, blended, refined and finally packed. The aroma was simply charismatic! (It was dark inside the factory so i am not adding its photos)

From there we went to the cafe where we were served the special Mackwoods tea for tasting (they do not charge for it). As we sat beside a window and sipped our tea, the rain poured down which made our experience even more beautiful. The drops on the window glass, the lush green gardens and the relatively cool weather made our tea taste even better! 🙂
On our way back we bought the signature Mackwoods kettle and some boxes of tea. It was later we figured out that they do not retail it and if you are really lucky you might see it at ODEL (A famous Srilankan store which is almost everywhere).
We have run out of tea boxes and it seems we need to visit Sri Lanka again…but this time we will at least buy a dozen of them! 😉