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That was more than 20 years ago. The kettle moved with me through high school, university, into my twenties, across two oceans. Tea was always the thing I did when I needed to think.
My dad taught me. He used to brew tea in the morning before anyone else was up, and one day he handed me the pot and showed me how. I remember thinking he was a better tea maker than my mum. Don't tell her I said that.
I was 26 and I wanted to learn properly. Not from books. Not from YouTube. From the people who had been making tea for hundreds of years. I spent three years in Kyoto, from 2014 to 2017, training the old school way.
That meant early mornings in small rooms with master teachers, learning each step by repetition until it became muscle memory. Whisking matcha. Steaming sencha. Roasting hojicha.
Most importantly, learning temomi, the hand-rolling technique for Japanese green tea that takes seven hours of work for a few hundred grams of finished leaf. Your hands ache for days. There is no shortcut.
Indian tea is its own world. Different climate, different leaf, different culture, completely different end product to what I had been working with in Japan. I spent time in Assam learning that side of the craft.
Black tea fermentation. Orthodox manufacturing. Blending for body and tannin rather than for umami. What I learned in Assam is that good tea has different languages depending on where it is grown.
The Japanese language of tea is about delicacy and structure. The Indian language is about depth and warmth. Both are true.
It was called Tea Space at first. Now it is Teafy India. Same business, evolved name. I set up a small operation in Kollam and started blending teas for the United States market. Black tea. Lychee peach. Berry blast. Several others. Each blend personally formulated. I would mix small test batches at night, sleep on them, brew them at 6am to see how they tasted with a clear palate, then adjust. We also launched a local Kollam tea blend.
Kerala is conservative when it comes to chai, people drink what their family drinks and they don't try new things easily. Watching our local blend take hold in a market like that was the first time I knew I could build a tea brand that people actually wanted, not just one that existed. The factory still runs today. It has been the quiet engine behind everything that came next.
I had been visiting Shizuoka for years by that point. There was one family farm I trusted, a sixth generation operation that had been growing tea in the same place since the 1800s. In 2021 I committed to buying in. Teafy now owns a 30 percent share of the family farm. That means when we sell our matcha, the leaf is grown on land we share in. Not sourced from a wholesaler. Not bought at auction. Grown by people we have skin in the ground with.
I lived in Japan through 2021 and 2022 while we worked out how the partnership would actually run. Production calendars. Quality standards. Cultivar decisions. Who decides when to harvest. Who decides when to stop a batch because the colour is not right. What that ownership stake actually buys is traceability. I know which fields the tea I sell you came from. I know the harvest week. I know who steamed it and rolled it and milled it. Almost no Australian matcha brand can say all of that, because most don't own a stake at source.
While I was finishing things up in Japan, Teafy Australia had already started running here. We had a small team in Melbourne, the first batches were being lab tested, the JAS, EU, USDA and Canada Organic paperwork was getting filed. I was in and out for most of that year. By 2023 I was full time on Teafy Australia. Today we ship single origin ceremonial matcha, hojicha, sencha, genmaicha and yuzu matcha into more than 300 Australian cafés, and direct to over 170,000 households who have left us over 2000 reviews on Reviews.io.
Three things. The leaf decides. You cannot brew good tea from mediocre leaf, and you cannot fake provenance with a clever label. This is why we own a share of the farm. So we know. Proof beats poetry. We get every batch lab tested by Agrifood Technology in Werribee, an ISO 17025 accredited Australian lab (NATA accreditation 2726). Our April 2026 report tested eight Teafy products. Every single one came back with lead under 0.1 mg/kg and mercury below the limit of detection. The full certificate is on our blog. The customer is allowed to ask hard questions. Where is it from. Who grew it. Why does mine taste different to the cafe one. Teafy exists to answer them honestly.
I am working on new custom matcha blends right now. The formulas are mine and they stay mine. I will not put them online for anyone to copy. But the next release coming through Teafy will be the closest thing to what we used to drink in those Kyoto mornings, made for Australian palates and Australian water. Thank you for being here. Tea is a slow business and a slow relationship. I am glad to be in it with you.
Founder and Tea Master
