As Pure as the Driven Snow-by Shikha Shah A Handunugoda Estate tea cup   Source:Dailynews If a certain tea or coffee has a cult following across the world, there is bound to be a fascinating, bizarre, or stomach-churning story behind it. Whether it is the Indonesian Kopi Luwak that is made from partially-digested coffee beans plucked from civet cat’s faeces, Chinese-origin panda poop tea enriched with panda dung or Oolong tea picked by monk-trained monkeys, the world’s rarest and most expensive tea and coffee varieties are either picked on a particular day, in a certain way or have poop or saliva going into them. On a misty, rainy afternoon, we are walking around the verdant Handunugoda Tea Estate, a 200-acre tea, rubber, cinnamon, pepper, and coconut estate in Galle in Southern Sri Lanka, about 160 km from Colombo. Since the estate is nestled between an evergreen rainforest and the vast ...

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