Yorkshire Tea senior buyer Suzy Garraghan on how she got into Bettys and Taylors of Harrogate role

“I tend to have less now than I used to, because I got into a big tea habit in lockdown, like we all did, probably. It was eight cups a day but I’m probably four or five now.”

Unlike the average tea drinker, though, Suzy’s livelihood depends on the stuff. She is Senior Tea Buyer at Bettys & Taylors of Harrogate, the company which produces Yorkshire Tea.

It may sound like the dream job, but Suzy initially joined the company almost by chance as a trainee in 2008 after a friend spotted an eye-catching advert.

“I had no idea whatsoever that a job such as a tea taster existed,” says Suzy at Pagoda House, Yorkshire Tea’s home in the Starbeck area of Harrogate.

“It was a complete fluke that I discovered it. I was a recent graduate and one Saturday morning my housemate said to me ‘I’ve found this perfect job for you’, because I drank a lot of tea.

“It was an advert in the miscellaneous section of the Saturday job paper. It was in the shape of a tea cup and saucer and it said: ‘Do you like tea? Are you confident in travelling independently? Would you like to be a trainee tea taster? If so, write a hand-written letter to do this address’.”

Although she is from the north-east, she has family in Yorkshire so was familiar with Bettys & Taylors.

“I just saw that advert and I thought, oh my goodness that sounds incredible.

“It was obvious that they did things a bit differently, just by the advert.

"It just felt really different and really personal.

"So I got my Basildon Bond out and my best pen and I wrote a letter. You can’t do hand-written letters now because you have to be more inclusive than that but back then you could ask that. So I did.”

Tasting - which involves slurping the tea - was part of her interview process but the ability to do it well didn’t make the difference between a job offer or none.

“Basically, if you’ve got a passion for tea, (and) if you like food and flavour, you can train yourself to be a professional taster of most things,” says Suzy.

“We’re a really varied team, by the way. There is no pre-requisite in how you become a tea buyer apart from passion for tea. You do have to be fairly good at maths and the commercials because it’s a highly commercial role but you just have to have a love and a real interest in the world, in people - because tea is the biggest beverage, next to water in the world.”

In regard to the tasting, she adds: “Your tongue is a muscle, so you can just develop it on the job.”

Before her trainee role, Suzy studied Development Studies at the University of East Anglia, with a particular focus on Sub-Saharan Africa.

“I never thought that I’d end up in the private sector,” she says. “I was always destined for something in the voluntary sector. I was interested in people and justice and fairness. But then when I saw that advert, with the things I had learned - a little bit, anyway - about agriculture and African-based commodities, plus my love of tea, it started to click into place and I thought ‘that’s a really good job’. Primarily because of the values as well, I knew (at) Bettys & Taylors we’d have an opportunity to do something a bit differently, or I sensed that even though I didn’t have any context on how.”

The job has taken her to tea estates in Africa, India and Indonesia, and out to Europe, where the company works with flavour houses in France and herb suppliers in Germany.

The premium Yorkshire Gold tea bag blend, for example, contains tea from Kenya, Rwanda and Assam.

“Ironically, I’ve never been to China, the home of tea,” she says.

What is it about tea that so many of us love so much?

Suzy says: “It’s really tricky to describe on a consumer level because unlike coffee and wine, tea has got really few what are called volatile aromas, so it gives us a really narrow vocabulary, whereas coffee and wine have got hundreds, so that’s why you’ve got this broad vocabulary of ‘notes of blackberry’ and all of that.”

Tea, she says, has got about 38 volatile aromas, but it has theanine in it, which has been linked to serotonin in the brain. “That’s one of the reasons why we feel really good when we have a cup of tea, it’s really refreshing.

"Most consumers can’t give you a vocabulary about why they like tea, they’ll give you an emotional response.”

The “briskness” found in Rwandan tea, for example, can leave drinkers feeling refreshed.

Suzy and her colleagues taste tea at double strength, but the differences in hard and soft water are also important for determining the quality.

She says: “Hard water has a different mineral content to soft, because it’s coming through boreholes, picking up minerals and calciums as it’s going under the ground. It’s got a different mineral content so it makes it more dense when it’s brewed with the tea. Soft water from reservoirs doesn’t have that mineral content. But hard water is like applying a magnifying glass to any attributes in the tea - good and bad.

“So from an evaluation perspective, everything we taste in here is from hard water, even though Harrogate is a soft water area. We have to have a really good relationship with Yorkshire Water and Ross-Lee Removals, who kindly go and collect the hardest hard water in North Yorkshire for us pretty much on a monthly basis.”

Indeed, it’s a hard job - but somebody’s got to do it.