Did you miss Part 1 on the British and Irish influence on Australian tea? Catch up here!
In Part II, we explore tea being grown alongside the wilderness of Queensland, Australia’s second largest state.
In the verdant, sun-drenched hills of northern Queensland, a quiet agricultural revolution is brewing. Far from the misty mountains of China or the sprawling estates of India, Australian-grown tea is developing its own place in the industry—one leaf at a time. While the country has long been a nation of tea drinkers, not many know that some of the finest, most distinctive steeps are being cultivated right in their backyard.
From the rich volcanic soils of the Atherton Tablelands to the coastal microclimates near Innisfail, Queensland’s tea growers are blending traditional techniques with modern innovation to produce varieties that are attracting attention on the global stage. As climate change shifts the boundaries of viable growing regions and consumers seek ethically sourced, locally produced goods, the Queensland tea industry is gaining both ground and prestige.
Here, we take you behind the scenes of this emerging industry—meeting the growers, exploring the unique terroir, and tasting the teas that are helping to redefine Australia’s place in the world of specialty brews.
Arakai Tea Estate: Innovation in a Forest Sanctuary
In an area of sloping topography that extends from the Eastern uplands to the coastal ranges surrounding rainforest interiors like choppy waves on a rough sea, Arakai Tea Estate lies embedded in hills of Southeast Queensland. A producer of whole leaf tea, Arakai blends innovation and craftsmanship in producing their premium black and green teas. The family-run estate has garnered international attention for its high -quality and limited-batch approach.
Situated on a swath of four hundred acres of forest owned by the Collins family, including sixty or so acres of land suitable for cultivation, Arakai started as a timber farm before the family turned their attention to tea. Adding avocado and ginger, the biodiversity present on the estate ensures that cultivation is conducted biodynamically.
The family bought the property in 1999 and spent the initial years focused on timber, especially cabinet timber. “We had someone living here doing the management of the property, and he left when we sold part of the tree planting business,” says Estate Manager and family member Brendon Collins.
Realizing that timber wasn’t sustainable, among other crops, they turned to tea, which came as an inspiration from an agricultural show they attended in 2009. “The more we looked into it, it just kept ticking all the boxes of things that we were looking to do here, and as a viable crop that would grow well here – and something that was a perennial crop – I didn't particularly want to be replanting it every year,” says Brendon. “We were after something that we could do the entire process ourselves here on the farm, and basically have a full retail product [at the end] that we could sell from here and set the price.”
He notes that the avocado and ginger grown on the estate is subject to market pricing, whereas selling premium tea offers more flexibility in that domain. Unlike cheap tea bags, the price of premium whole leaf tea is determined by quality rather than commodity-pricing.
Beginning with a trial plot in 2010 and observing the growth, they added plants until they’d covered around three acres. It only took four years for a commercial harvest to be realized, owing to the rich volcanic soil and acidic conditions resulting from forest cover, providing a nourishing terroir for tea.
“Ours is definitely growing in some pretty lush soil!” remarks Brendon. “You know, we've got some very, very, rich volcanic soil here, good rainfall – and, you know, good climate. So, we've just finished our ninth year of actual commercial tea making.” Still, Collins says the differences over the years have been “quite dramatic.”
What sets Arakai apart is the family’s commitment to regenerative farming. Like Madura Tea Estate (see Part I), at Arakai, a completely vertically integrated model is in operation – growing, harvesting, processing, and packaging – all on-site.
The cool elevation and subtropical climate of the region provide ideal conditions for Camellia sinensis, enabling Arakai to produce award-winning teas that rival traditional tea powerhouses like Japan, China, and India in quality.
Still, the family – Brendon in particular (as he freely admits) – had to ride a steep learning curve. “I wasn't exactly a massive tea drinker before, other than, you know, a strong black with a bit of milk and sugar," he said. His sister and parents were more the connoisseurs.
The family sourced the plants from a nursery called Paradise Plants in Australia because of the country’s strict rules around biosecurity in terms of bringing plants in from abroad.
“Yeah, it could cost you upwards of a million dollars to bring a new species in,” Brendon says. “And there's every chance that it doesn't actually survive through the biosecurity stage.”
They planted blocks of six Japanese varietals, which as it turns out, facilitates their harvesting cycle because the blocks flush intermittently. So, the mechanical harvester will harvest one varietal at time following which each batch then gets individually processed.
The family bought processing equipment and has built up their own factory – but prior to this development, during the first year, they picked as much leaf as they could manage, packed it in boxes, and drove the boxes to Sidney for processing – a twelve-hour drive! And, this doesn’t account for taking breaks to sleep. The oxidation of the leaf that took place in the boxes basically made withering unnecessary. That first year Brendon calls a “semi-commercial harvest.” However, it was a profound learning experience for the Collins family as they got to see how raw orthodox leaf is processed into dry rolled whole leaf tea that is ready for packaging.
Brendon went from being a tea bag drinker to a true premium whole leaf tea enthusiast. In setting up the factory, the Collins family visited China and Japan. There, different tea producers gave them conflicting advice, telling them they didn’t know what they were doing. It must have been a confounding and humbling experience through which they found a resolution. “Ultimately, we picked from a range of machinery that we thought would give us the best possibilities,” says Brendon.
It took a few years before they hit their stride. “2018 was just such a magic year for us. Every bit of tea that we made was just incredible,” Brendon recalls.
Soon enough, their teas were gaining recognition at regional and international competitions, winning some thirty awards over the years consisting of: multiple Golden Leaf Awards for their "Spring Flush" black tea, including Best Australian Black Tea and Best Single Origin Worldwide; the Hobart Fine Food Silver and Gold medals – also for their black tea, Spring Flush; and highly commended at the UK Tea and Infusions’ Leafie Awards.
Having sampled one of the black Golden Leaf Award winning teas – a vintage 2023/24 tea, I found it to be a sweet, well-balanced and smoothly textured tea with notes of honey, caramel, and musk. The cup carried a prominent aroma and full-bodied taste but without a hint of astringency or bitterness – perhaps as close to a Darjeeling muscatel that I’ve tasted from outside the region. Hence, it’s understandable how Arakai’s teas have gained worldwide recognition.
The cultivation season runs from September (which is spring Down Under) until March or April, which is when autumn begins. Plucking occurs on a rolling basis except after the spring, which flushes separately from the remainder of the year. “The cool four months of winter that we get here lends itself to a really distinct spring flush, and we pick and market that as its own product,” Brendon remarks. “It really stands out, as far as quality goes, from all the other ones. And then every six weeks [plucking takes place].”
They call the next three harvests their “summer picks” because they are similar in quality and flavor. “And if we do a harvest, which we rarely do, that'll be an autumn [picking], and it's remarkably different,” Brendon says.
Arakai, Brendon says, is “as organic as possible,” meaning they don’t used pesticides and the nutrition is organic. Indeed, the garden was totally organic for the first five years – but they found it difficult to “maintain the vigor of the plants,” says Brendon. So, they use some urea as fertilizer as well as organic fertilizer, “just to keep the nitrogen levels up,” he adds.
“We use liquid feed as well. So, we've got ‘pop up’ overhead sprinklers now set up so we can do the sort of foliar fertigation as well… put in all the good stuff in like that. All the seaweed and the kelp and that sort of stuff,” Brendon says. “It’s as good a mix as I think we can [manage] that lets us keep the vigor up. And the flavor is still good and allows us to do that.”
The main challenge of gaining organic certification, especially in cooler climates in which pests aren’t so much of an issue, is the availability and cost of organic fertilizers, like manure. Generally, due to the disparity in nitrogen levels, it takes around 100 times more organic fertilizer than urea to run an organic plantation – this impacts time, effort, and cost significantly. For many growers, their local markets are unlikely to bear the premium of going organic, and the lack of certainty around this tends to keep gardens conventional.
As mentioned, Arakai Estate tea is at the premium end of the market. They do black and green, sold as both loose leaf and in pyramid tea bags (containing loose leaf), making a conscious decision to keep their product high-end, not bothering to gather fannings or dust for filling regular tea bags, risking an association with the cheaper teas that are available.
Their green teas are also on the premium end of the market due to the Oolong-like processing they apply. “[It's] generally eighteen or so hours after harvesting before we actually start the process. We'll pick in the morning...we spread drop mats out over the floor, get all the leaf spread out, and cool down as much as possible. And just let it wither in the open air. We then have a tumbling in a big bamboo shaker,” says Brendon. The tea gets placed on bamboo racks and is left to wither overnight. Their process is similar to how tea is processed in Taiwan, which is known for their oolongs.
“We don't actually start the processing till the next morning. If [it goes] through quite a long, slow oxidization before we start…it means that there's a probably a lot more depth of flavor in the green tea than what they normally would be," says Brendon, who explains that their green tea is closer to black tea. “There's actually not a huge amount of difference in the dry leaf color for us between the green and the black.
"Our green teas [have] quite a lot more floral sweetness in there. And that's what we've been trying to develop with that that long, long, withering time.”
Arakai’s customers are tea connoisseurs for the most part, but a growing movement to buy locally is impacting sales. “I guess there's a pretty decent health and local food movement in Australia, and as soon as people find out that there is an option of something like tea that's grown locally, they'll, you know, they'll give it a shot,” Brendon says. “I had someone drive out here yesterday from an hour away to come and pick up some tea just because they've heard about us and wanted to support a local business and try something that they hope will be better for them than the stuff they're getting in the shops.”
Still, reaching people is a challenge since most still buy tea from the supermarkets and associate it with cheap tea bags. It really takes sampling and education for the market in premium tea to flourish in Australia, which is where premium retailers like the Little sisters of Tour de Tea become so important in exposing the public to premium teas – including Arakai’s.
“I guess the biggest thing is [for] people to try it out. The tasting is pretty much the thing,” Brendon emphasizes. “Everyone's got their preconceptions about what tea is like here in Australia.
"Then you give them a cup of [whole leaf] black tea that's brewed well and has no milk in it, and they try it....We've converted a lot of people just by giving them a cup of tea and saying, ‘here, try this,’” Brendon adds.
Like many premium whole leaf producers, Arakai intends to grow its market one cup at a time. While on-site visits take place, after the Covid-19 pandemic blew through Queensland (as it did all over the world), they stopped giving tours. Occasionally, they spend an hour or two with visitors talking and drinking tea. But for Brendon, “It’s a luxury to take out a block of time to spend with say, two people – even though I enjoy it,” he says.
Arakai is truly a family-run estate. While Brendon is the plantation, processing and packaging manager, Brendon’s father, Darryl Collins, is the tea processing master, his mother, Lorraine is a tea taster and does administrative support along with Brendon’s wife, Kristie.
Daintree Tea Company: Possibly the Largest Producer in Australia
Farther north in Queensland – a good 22-hour drive from Arakai Estate along Australia’s east coast – and sheltered by the Daintree Rainforest, lies an estate owned by Daintree Tea Company, established in 1978 by the Nicholas family. The plantation’s unique location in one of the world’s oldest tropical rainforests shades the tea plants from the sometimes-punishing sun, and they grow in rich volcanic soil at the estate, enabling tea to be cultivated so far north. Combined with ample rainfall and warm temperatures, Daintree offers ideal conditions for tea cultivation of the type planted there. In Australia, moving north means the climate is significantly warmer than that experienced at Arakai, even though both are located in the state of Queensland.
Greg Nicholas, who runs the plantation, paints an eclectic picture of Daintree Tea Company’s history: “My parents started [the plantation],” he says. “Before they before they were growing tea, they were growing bananas, they grazed cattle. They've done a lot of different crops. And they've done a lot of research crops with the Department of Primary Industry [DPI].”
Indeed, the DPI was instrumental in focusing the family on tea. From their test trials on tea, the DPI thought that tea could be a big thing in Australia, so the family jumped into the industry.
Nicholas was just a kid when all of this took place and strains a bit to recall the timeline: “That would have been before 1978, because by 1978, we were ground deep. We started planting tea in acreage by 1978.”
The Nicholas family sourced their seed from an old tea plantation, in a coastal township called Innisfail in Northern Queensland. The region is known for tea. Indeed, in the late 19th century, the Cutten brothers established the first Australian tea plantation near Bingil Bay, a suburb of Innisfail not far from Nerada Tea Plantation, which for a long time was considered to be Australia’s largest tea farm. But there are reports from other planters that it was closed last season. If it doesn’t re-open, Daintree may now own that position with over ninety acres under cultivation.
Daintree’s harvesting season begins around the end of August and continues through until March, and plucking takes place every two weeks. In 2007, Nicholas developed a double row harvester to pick the tea more efficiently. “You're still planting on around 90 acres. But you have double the yield,” he says.
Daintree doesn’t have to be so precise in its plucking as it makes Crush Tear Curl (CTC) tea, which is the main source of tea for tea bags (though they do sell loose tea).
The plantation doesn’t have distinct flushes like other tea gardens. Rather, due to the speed of growth of the tea bushes, Nicholas runs his harvester every four to eight days, which is how he can achieve such a high yield. On average, the plantation produces approximately 35,000 kilograms of tea annually –that’s almost 39 US tons – making it a powerhouse of tea production compared to other Australian plantations.
Not only does Nicholas supply stores and sells directly to customers, globally, he also sells to wholesalers who mark it with their own branding. However, he doesn’t deal directly with chain supermarkets. “I used to sell in supermarkets but found that it’s just not in my interest to deal with them,” he says. Nicholas claims a significant share of the CTC tea that is sold as Australian tea is sourced from his plantation.
“Most of my customers are repeat customers,” Nicholas says. As other tea producers in Australia have closed, he says he has picked up most of their customers who are intent on buying 100% Australian tea.
While the estate is conventional, Nicholas tries his best to be as sustainable as is cost-effective. He doesn't use chemical pesticides, but he does use fertilizers.
Nicholas uses standard granulated fertilizer. While he’d like to use organic manure, he faces impediments that other plantations don’t. “With the Australian rules, if you start adding manure… then you're digging yourself a hole with, you know, food. It just becomes a major problem because we're such a wet area. And there's so much moisture,” he says. "It doesn't really work. If you're out in the dry country where you can irrigate, you can control your water, which we can’t. We don't irrigate at all. We just rely on natural rainfall.”
In Part 3, we’ll find out how Tassie T deals with excessive rain and poor drainage on the island of Tasmania.
While Nicholas no longer grows bananas or grazes cattle on his land, he does pollination work for other farmers to cultivate avocado. He also produces honey. “I keep beehives…about 200 beehives, so I produce honey.”
Nicholas knows that he’s not going likely to become a billionaire cultivating tea but finds working the land rewarding in a way that is set apart from other businesses or professions. “It’s a great lifestyle,” he says. “You grow something, process it, sell it, meet interesting people over the years, get feedback from customers – and it makes you quite proud of what you’re doing.”
With a rich coppery color when brewed and a smooth earthy flavor (unlike other high astringency CTC teas), this high yielding singly-sourced tea harvested in the heart of a rainforest is a crop that the Nicholas family of Daintree Tea Company can certainly take pride in.
Stay tuned for Part III of our series on tea in Australia as we explore tea cultivation on the “Island of Gastronomy.”
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