Father-son duo discover challenges of making tea

ABC NEWS (Australia)

A lot of Australians love a cup of tea. And on Queensland's Sunshine Coast, a father and son duo have discovered a lot of effort goes into growing and making it.

Transcript

00:00 Tucked away in a place most people have likely never heard of, flanked on one side by national

00:16 parks and on the other by a beautiful man-made rainforest, father and son duo Darrell and

00:24 Brendan Collins are doing something unique.

00:29 Barakaya Estate is in Bellthorpe, which is a small community in the Sunshine Coast hinterland

00:34 and we started the property to plant rainforest trees essentially, growing rainforest trees

00:39 for timber.

00:41 We went into the tea making thing fairly, very naively, thinking this will be easy.

00:48 It certainly isn't.

00:50 We're aiming to produce a very high quality tea, a very high quality whole leaf tea.

00:55 They're probably the only producers in Australia that do it.

01:00 So we were looking for something different and something unique.

01:05 I saw a landline program somewhere that talked about tea and I thought, well that's interesting,

01:11 we'll see what happens there.

01:12 So I did a bit of research and everything seemed to add up, you know, everything that

01:17 I looked at, the tea required we had here.

01:21 Their tea journey really began in 2008.

01:25 The first step was to work out what kind of tea they'd produce.

01:30 There's really not a lot of knowledge or information in Australia about growing tea that's readily

01:35 available, but there was an Australian green tea growers group that we were able to hunt

01:41 down and find some information from.

01:43 Their fact-finding mission took them to China and later Taiwan, where they met with master

01:49 tea producers and manufacturers to source machinery and other necessary supplies.

01:55 I sat down with them and told them what we wanted to do and they basically shook their

01:59 head and said that's not how you do it.

02:01 And we went ahead anyway.

02:03 You're supposed to know what you're going to grow before you plant, but we did everything

02:08 backwards.

02:10 The plantation was built in three stages.

02:13 There are 12,000 tea bushes in these five kilometres of hedgerows.

02:18 Green tea is a camellia, camellia sinensis sinensis, and within that there's thousands

02:24 of different varietals from different areas.

02:26 But ours have all come from Japan and they're originally meant for Japanese green tea.

02:31 It took about five years of growing and pruning and pruning and pruning to get a really nice

02:37 branching structure.

02:39 And after about five years we were able to do our first commercial harvest.

02:43 So Brendan, what are you actually looking for when you're checking to see whether or

02:46 not it's looking good for harvest?

02:49 What we're after is the freshest new growth of tea.

02:53 So these top couple of tips?

02:55 Yeah, ideally just a bud, a leaf and the second leaf and that's what's going to make the best

03:02 quality, freshest, sweetest tea for us.

03:04 [Music]

03:06 [BLANK_AUDIO]

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