Coorg (Kodagu)
A hill district in Karnataka on the Western Ghats, better known for coffee, where tea occupies the higher and wetter ground alongside it. Gardens are frequently shaded and interspersed with spice and coffee planting rather than laid out as monoculture estates, and most output is CTC. The interest is agronomic: Coorg shows how tea behaves as a secondary crop in a landscape organised around something else.
Elevation
Recorded at 800–1400 metres.
How firm this is: Inferred from general knowledge of the district rather than measured or taken from a source that states it. Tea plots sit across a wide elevation band within the district and the range is indicative.
When it is picked
A Western Ghats calendar organised around the south-west monsoon: heavy rain drives a long wet-season growth, the drier months slow it, and there is no dormancy of the kind the Himalayan districts have. Because tea here is frequently the secondary crop, its picking rounds are fitted around the coffee and spice calendar that the landscape is actually organised for — an agronomic constraint that a monoculture estate does not have.
How firm this is: Inferred from general knowledge of the district rather than measured or taken from a source that states it.
How production is organised
Estates and smallholdings in a district far better known for coffee, with tea frequently a secondary crop on the same holding. The consequence for a buyer is that Coorg tea is rarely marketed as an origin — it is auction material from a coffee district.
How firm this is: Inferred from general knowledge of the district rather than measured or taken from a source that states it.
How the name is written
Also transliterated as coorg, kodagu. Romanisations of a district name vary by system and by vendor, and a packet spelling one way is not describing a different place.
Other growing regions in India
The neighbouring districts are the useful comparison: they share a country, a grading convention and often a cultivar, so what differs between them is closer to terroir than anything a cross-border comparison can isolate.
Sources
- TeaHQ editorial synthesis — TeaHQ
This page is TeaHQ’s own synthesis throughout. No external document stands behind the elevation band, the climate note or the character described above, which is why each carries its confidence in the open.