The tour of the tea factory was informative enough, albeit delivered in a robotic way, as if reciting from a well rehearsed script. The green tea is ok but do not buy the white tea or golden tea. It tastes nothing like the samples they let you try in the shop. As the tea comes packed in a box, we could not inspect the leaves. When we got home, we found that the leaves were brown and withered, unlike white tea from other good brands. The tea is also very overpriced. Save your money and buy from other brands like Halpe or Basilur. Have attached a photo of the tea from Storefield (on the left) vs Basilur. See the difference in the colour. Tea was also tasteless and produced a strange brown brew, despite following all the instructions (75-80 degrees water, 5 mins brew time).

Nice welcome on arrival. Interesting tour of the factory and brief demonstration of each machine. Good description and sampling of the various teas (black and white and green) that they produce and then an 8 cup sampling session which was good. However then they started with the hard sell, offering us numerous teas, in a variety of sizes/combination packs, with ( as we later realised) exorbitant prices. Admittedly one tea offered was a fine white tea, but they tried to get £50 for 50g from us. We managed to haggle them down to £15, which is more in line with what you’ll pay in all the other team factories. Following day we went to Pedro which was a better tour, with better priced tea, you could see the tea plantations and the pickers, and added benefit of then walking to the Lovers Leap waterfall which was beautiful. Stonegate is ok, but there are better tea factories.

The guide was nice, explained to us how each of the machine works, but none of them were actually on, so there was really nothing to see. They’ll talk to you for about 10 minutes and then send you to sit and wait for the tasting of different tea. You’ll get a spoon and 8 cups of tea. Then you’re expected to buy something. Whenever a tourist comes, they’ll tell you some random high price to pay but DON’T. They told us golden white tea is 20.000Rs (for 100 g), when we wanted only 50 g, they said 12.000 Rs. We told them it’s too expesinve, not knowing they can put the price down and left with 50 g for 6.000 Rs (which is still pretty expensive i think). The family next to us was offered like 4 differents packs of tea for 15.000 Rs. It wasn’t bad, the experience was nice, it’s just a tourist trap and I think you can find way better factories in Sri Lanka. I would also like to see the plantations or the process of making tea, but none of that you can see here.