Growing Tea the Aussie Way

AUSTRALIA

Arakai Estate is a small tea garden along the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, Australia. It was originally a deer farm and then a rainforest timber operation. The Collins family that now owns it looked for a crop to complement their timber growing and milling and avocado cultivation, which are mainly done in the winter months when tea is dormant. Tea also offered an opportunity to do something new and different.

The estate has won the Australian Tea Masters’ Golden Leaf award for three years out of the four that it has harvested tea. It has built a strong international reputation and most of its sales are from abroad. It’s proud of its “rogue Australian” approach to producing a light tea suited to the Australian palate. This non-traditional way began with importing Japanese cultivars because they were the most practical, given Australia’s very strict biosecurity rules. This choice favored the style of tea Brendan Collins, the father of the family and director of the tea initiative, aimed for: “a really light and flowery and naturally sweet tea.” That is very different from the national tea consumption he disdains. This reflects the British heritage of plain, black, and mediocre “commodi-tea” (Collin’s own term).

The estate is laid out as a line of tea hedges, making it easy for machine harvesting. This is done by using two old bikes tied to a frame that holds up the cutter heads. The line is five kilometers long, with a total harvest of 25 km; “It’s basically just a camellia hedge.” Collins estimates that he has pushed “that thing” 600 kilometers. The harvesting takes two people 4-5 days.

The bushes are from six Japanese cultivars. The terroir is ideal for tea: good pH levels in the soil, a subtropical climate with excellent rainfall, an elevation that ensures the cold that the plants need for their dormant period in the winter, and a far lower degree of pests and diseases than larger tea growing regions, eliminating the need for spraying plants. Arakai’s farming is intrinsically organic. A caveat must be added here. These statements apply historically but the 2018-19 period of unprecedented floods, fire, and drought may signal a climate change that is irreversible and unstoppable in its damage. No one knows if this will be so.

Arakai is illustrative of a wave of innovation in Australia’s tea markets. Unilever’s T2 retail business has become a global pace-setter in high end specialty tea shops. There is a growing variety of small growers in Queensland and New South Wales, which are creating distinctive mainly Japanese-style teas – in the Aussie way.