No, we haven’t been watching Dumbo too much. When you’re working on the tea estates of Assam’s Brahmaputra Valley, encounters with wild elephants are a fact of life. Thankfully, it’s a relatively peaceful co-existence. Unless they decide to lie down among the tea bushes that is, when they uproot everything around them to ensure they’ve got a comfy spot. Or when they eat a bit too much fermented fruit and get tipsy.

But what does a drunken elephant do exactly?

We put this question to our tea-buyer Sanjay, who’s just returned from a visit to some of our key Assam suppliers. His answer – that “they just a get a bit naughty” – was somewhat vague. And more than a little eyebrow-raising too. So we pressed him for a bit more detail.

Apparently, what it really boils down to is that they stumble around, knocking things over, trampling bushes and generally making a nuisance of themselves.

Luckily for Sanjay, the wild elephants he encountered at Jorhat were much better behaved. In fact, he says it was good to see how the managers of the estates encourage people to live and work alongside the animals harmoniously.

Of course, Sanjay was there to do more than just assess human-elephant relations. The tea in Assam is about to enter its crucial second flush (essentially the ‘second round’ of harvesting) and it’s the tea from this particular growing period that gives our blend its body, strength and that lovely malty flavor. So getting a sneak preview of how the crop is doing is obviously pretty important to us.

To build up a picture of where the best tea is likely to come from this season, Sanjay visited a total of twelve gardens in just seven days. It might be quite a hectic schedule, but as it was Sanjay’s first visit as a Taylors tea-buyer it was a great opportunity to meet some of our most important suppliers.

And a few elephants, of course.