Special Satemwa Harvest

Together with you, our customers, we are pre-purchasing a tea harvest direct from a farm in Africa. This is a new tea, never tasted before. A unique first flush spring harvest tea, picked and crafted on Satemwa in the Shire Highlands of Malawi.

One unique harvest - from one unique field - from one unique farm.

This is not the way things are normally done.

7 companies supply around 90% of the tea sold in Europe and North America. That tea passes between the 7 and through many hands and brands before it reaches the consumer. The vast majority of tea communities supplying this tea continue to live in poverty. Life expectancy can be as low as 40’s. Access to adequate health care and education is lacking and sexual violence and discrimination is rife. This is the status quo that allows consumers a cheap tea bag.

We can do things differently. This harvest is an infinitely more delicious tea that directly benefits the people who grow and craft it - not giant agribusiness and their shareholders.

This one harvest won’t change everything - it won't change very much at all, but we ARE doing something and proving that we are not powerless and that our choices matter.

This harvest spotlights why tea isn’t just a bag in a box on a shelf. Tea comes from a farm, not a supermarket and the people who grow and craft it matter. Together we can work with them to change the world, a little bit, for the better.

We are giving you the opportunity to pre-order the exclusive first spring harvest of a unique tea that has never been drunk before. A first ever harvest of a new tea.

This project has taken 5 years. Crafted from a Malawian cultivar developed by the Tea Research Foundation in Mujanje - this is a black tea with unique flavours of jasmine and lemon. The tea is being hand-rolled to bring out every delicate nuance of flavour just for Rare Tea customers.

This tea is at the heart of innovation - like roses, or grape vines it is possible to develop wonderful hybrids to create amazing new flavours and plants best suited to their local environment. It has been specially developed to meet the local and very real challenges of the climate crisis faced by tea farmers.

"This is sustainable tea on every level - environmental, social and economic. A tea that will bring huge pleasure to any tea drinker as well as directly supporting a farm."

Henrietta Lovell

Through this direct collaboration between farm, tea company and tea-drinker we hope to demonstrate that we truly can forge a new model.

By pre-ordering some of the best tea in the world, we ask tea-drinkers to support a guaranteed harvest of high value, amazing tasting tea.

Not industrial tea made by machine and stuffed in a bag, made for the lowest cost. The best tea is crafted by men and women with great skill for real value with the value staying right there, on the farm.

This is Rachel hand rolling the leaf after the initial pick.

If we bought tea like wine, tea communities might thrive like vineyards.

This tea is being crafted right now and is only available to pre-purchase until 16th May 2021 for delivery in August.