Each of SMC's two Dooars tea estates, Soongachi and New Glencoe, has its own factory. The estates themselves are huge - according to figures I've seen, the Dooars region as a whole produces ten times as much tea as Darjeeling - but, even knowing that, I wasn't ready for the scale of the factories. I'm not sure exactly what I expected, but the factories seemed staggeringly large. In one withering area alone, you could almost play soccer. (You might want more vertical clearance, though.)
The factories work by a combination of heavy power equipment and hand work. Unloading trucks full of leaves is done by hand, and it's heavy work. There are furnaces, industrial scale blowers, and overhead conveyors snaking around, but there are also men using straw brooms to spread out the finished granules to ferment and dry in thin layers. Once that's done, the granules go back into the industrial age to be dried some more under heat and then automatically heat-sealed into packages mechanically created from a continuously fed tube of thin plastic.
The CTC process, which is basically what they do, was invented by Indians according to SMC, and he feels rueful about it because it enables consumers to brew a dark cup with less leaf, depressing the market. I was surprised to hear that the CTC rollers, the big metal cylinders with jagged teeth arrayed in an intricate pattern, are manufactured on site. Once you've seen those rollers, "crush, tear, curl" becomes almost painfully clear.
The aromas in some areas of the factories are very strong. In the withering area, there's a scent of fresh green leaf, but at a level of intensity far beyond what you'd smell in any field: scary, almost. In the area where the granules ferment, the aroma is just as strong but quite different: maybe yeasty, winey, or like a cider press, but not exactly like any of them.
/Lew