TRFK 306/1

The purple-leaf cultivar released by Kenya’s Tea Research Foundation and the basis of the country’s purple tea. The colour comes from anthocyanin pigmentation in the leaf and is a breeding outcome rather than a processing one.

Camellia sinensis var. assamicaTRFK 306/1KenyaAlso called Kenyan purple tea cultivar

Where it sits in the botany

TRFK 306/1 is recorded under Camellia sinensis var. assamica, the variety group one level above cultivar. It is associated with Kenya, which is where it was selected or is most widely planted rather than the only place it grows.

Registration code: TRFK 306/1. A breeding or registration code identifies the selection in an institutional register and is often the name a grower uses when the trade name is not.

Also transliterated as: trfk 306/1.

What the plant is like

Purple tea is a cultivar, not a sixth category. It is processed as green or as black like any other leaf, and this record makes no health claim about the pigment.

Why a grower plants it

Yield, hardiness, when it buds, what it resists and whether a machine can cut it. This is the half of a cultivar’s identity that decides what is actually in the ground, and it is usually left out of writing aimed at drinkers.

Released into a smallholder-dominated industry that had been planting a handful of high-yielding clones for decades, and offered as a diversification away from bulk CTC black tea sold by the kilogram at the Mombasa auction. Its case to a farmer is price rather than yield: purple leaf is a differentiated product that can be sold outside the auction, and Kenyan tea's structural problem is that its ordinary leaf is excellent and utterly interchangeable. It is drought-tolerant and suited to the high-altitude Kenyan conditions, and it yields less than the standard commercial clones — which makes the price premium the whole argument, and makes the crop vulnerable if the premium narrows.

What it does in the cup

Made as a lightly oxidised or green-style tea it is light-bodied, brisk and faintly woody with a mild astringency, and the liquor is a pale purplish-brown that shifts toward pink when acidified. It does not taste like blackcurrant or berry despite what the colour leads people to expect, and vendors who describe it that way are describing the colour.

How much of this is really the cultivar?

Purple tea's colour is genuinely a cultivar trait — anthocyanin pigmentation in the leaf, bred for, not a processing effect — and its flavour largely is not. The pigment itself contributes little to taste; what a purple tea tastes like is decided by how far it was oxidised and how it was dried, exactly as with any other leaf, and the same TRFK 306/1 leaf can be made into something green-ish and grassy or something dark and brisk. Almost all the marketing attaches to the anthocyanin content, which is a compositional statement TeaHQ will make, and to what the anthocyanins are supposed to do, which it will not: that surface is held. Purple tea is a cultivar processed conventionally, not a sixth category of tea.

Cultivar, growing site and processing all shape a cup, and the cultivar is very often the smallest of the three. It is also the one that fits on a label, so almost every commercial incentive runs toward overstating it. This section is on every cultivar page that has been reviewed for it, including the ones where the honest answer is “less than you would think”.

What it is usually made into

The categories this cultivar is typically processed into. It is a statement about common practice, not a limit — processing decides the category, and a cultivar can be taken down more than one route.

Black tea — Tea taken deliberately through full enzymatic oxidation, giving the dark leaf, amber-to-red liquor and malty or brisk character most Western drinkers think of as simply 'tea'.
Green tea — Tea whose oxidation is halted early by heat, keeping the leaf green and the cup fresh, vegetal or marine in character.

Teas in the catalogue made from TRFK 306/1

Kenyan purple tea

Guides covering this cultivar

Reading a cultivar code: TV1, TRI 2043, TRFK 31/8, Taicha No. 18 — Half the world’s tea plants are known by codes rather than names, and the codes are not arbitrary. Each one records which institution made the selection and, often, where in its programme the plant sits.
Albino, yellow and purple: the tea plants with a pigment fault — A handful of tea cultivars produce leaves that are not green — white, yellow, or purple. In every case the colour is a property of the plant rather than of the processing, and in every case the name of the resulting tea has been confused with a processing category.

Sources

TeaHQ editorial synthesis — TeaHQ

This page is TeaHQ’s own synthesis throughout. No breeding register or institutional record stands behind the account above, which is why the origin note carries its confidence in the open rather than reading as a citation.

How TeaHQ handles sources

Written comparisons

Where TeaHQ has set this cultivar against something it is routinely confused with, and argued the differences out in full.

TRFK 306 vs TRFK 31/8 — Two Kenyan clonal cultivars that show what a research-led planting programme does to a national industry. One is the purple-leaf plant behind Kenya’s purple tea; the other is a workhorse selected for the brisk coloured liquor that CTC blending demands.
TRFK 306 vs Zi Juan — The two purple tea cultivars, one Kenyan and one from Yunnan, sold under the same marketing category and unrelated as plants. Both have anthocyanin-rich leaf; beyond the colour they share very little, and neither constitutes a category of tea.