When asked about his experience establishing and running a tea cultivation business in The Republic of Georgia, Hannes Saarpuu, co-founder of Renegade Tea Estate, says with a smirk, “It has been one hell of a rollercoaster ride.”
Renegade runs three tea plantations called Renegade Estate (named for the company, it being the first estate established); Rioni Estate (named after the Rioni river which borders it); and Mandikori Estate (bearing the same name as the village where it is located). The estates are situated around a twenty-minute drive from the city of Kutaisi in the Imereti region of Western Georgia.
While the former Soviet satellite state is known for many things – its rolling hills, lush forest, free-flowing wine, fresh cheese, and warm hospitality – it is only recently becoming known again for producing flavorful teas.
While tea may not seem an obvious commodity to grow in such a Northern country, being nestled in the foothills of the Caucuses it is home to a sub-tropical region known for chilly winters and hot summers. This climate combined with fertile soil and elevations ranging from 1,000-1,500 feet, comprise some of the most favorable conditions for cultivating tea. The hills extend to higher elevations, but Saarpuu says the winters are too harsh at those heights.
The lack of tea production evident between 1991 and the late 2010s belies the history of the land as tea estates in Georgia were established in the nineteenth century during the erstwhile Russian Empire of which Georgia was an integral part. Tea is believed to have first been brought to Georgia in the early 19th century when Prince Mamia V. Gurieli began growing Camellia sinensis in his botanical garden. In 1847, another prince, Miha Eristavi, who, like British tea pioneer, Robert Fortune, smuggled tea seeds from China in the hollows of bamboo canes to seed Georgia’s first tea plantation. Having been to China, he concluded that the Georgian climate was suitable for tea harvesting.
The Russian taste for tea dates back earlier – to the eighteenth century – a period during which they were importing from China. Between 1790 and 1890, the empire was bringing in around 250,000 pounds of tea from China each year, proving to be a rather costly endeavor. After learning of the success of the Georgian experiments in 19th century, Georgia became a significant source of the tea Russia.
Georgians have steeped leaves in hot water since as long as their recorded history, using the leaves of berries as tonics for medicinal purposes. Hence, drinking tea came naturally to them.
During the Soviet era, the tea plantations were nationalized by the state, which being communist, banned private ownership altogether. After the fall of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and its subsequent dismembering into different countries, the new Georgian government inherited the estates. The problem they faced was that the expertise to run the estates went with the Soviets. It had been a century since the heyday of Georgian tea circa the Russian Empire. By and large, the Georgian government didn’t know what to do with the estates, and they had bigger problems with which to contend as their economy awkwardly transitioned from communism to a free market.
“In the early nineties, they [the tea estates] were all abandoned, so they were just like, overgrown with trees and weeds, and everything growing wild for like twenty-five years,” says Saarpuu. “So when we took them, they were there like bushland and forests in some places. So, we had to clear all these weeds and other foliage, just keeping the shade trees.”
The Georgian government retained ownership of the land in the post-Soviet era, so Renegade rented the plantations they were planning on running from the State. The Georgian government was only too happy to generate some revenue from abandoned unproductive land.
As the knowledge for cultivating tea had been siphoned out of Georgia when the Soviet Union crumbled, Renegade had to start over. In 2017, Saarpuu joined with two friends and colleagues, namely, Kristiina Mehik, and Tomas Kaziliunas – and dove right in.
They felt like renegades, not ever having cultivated tea before; hence, the name of the company. Coming from a marketing and product development background, the trio felt confident that if they could produce quality teas, they would surely be able to market and sell them. Their teas would have to be of higher quality than what was produced in the Soviet era – an operation designed to maximize yield at the expense of quality. Afterall, the comrades of the USSR didn’t have the luxury of making choices in their consumption; the people had to be satisfied with what the state provided.
Saarpuu and his friends knew they would be taking a big risk but rebelling against conventional wisdom, they drove forward. “In our personal lives, we were at the stage that we wanted to do something different. So, we just jumped on it and decided that, ‘Okay, let's see what we can do and how far we can get.’ So now it's [been] almost 8 years [since the business was established]” says Hannes, recounting their thinking at the time and looking back with some measure of pride.
Their passion for the project far out-scaled their fears. At the end of 2020, they conducted a crowd-funding campaign offering small shares to investors, bringing the total number of owners to ninety-six with all but the original founders owning very small shares.
The small Renegade team found themselves waste-deep in the brush at the outset, swinging machetes and using weed cutters to clear the land of the overgrowth. “Well, it was kind of like, completely wild – and we didn’t do any mechanical cleaning,” Saarpuu recalls.
One advantage of being abandoned for so long coupled with their distance from metropolitan areas is that the soil of the gardens was chemical free. Seeing this as a circumstantial boon, they made sure not to add any chemicals, keeping their gardens organic.
Indeed, the cold winters naturally kill off pests and potential diseases, which is essential for organic cultivation – there is no need to use pesticides or chemical sprays to prevent disease. This has facilitated the organic certification of the gardens, which is especially important in marketing to Western Europe, particularly Germany, where organic tea is preferred.
While they started planting as soon as areas were cleared, only being able to do so in the summer months, it took them almost three years to completely clear the land.
Once the land had been cleaned up, they found that the tea plants had survived in about 80% of the plantation area, and they did some replanting as well. While the company is considering planting afresh in the future, they have enough viable bushes to keep their focus selling the tea grown from their existing plants.
It wasn’t necessarily a smooth process to reinvigorate the gardens. In some areas, the process of growing viable plants was arduous. “So, once we had cleaned some areas, initially, nothing happened. And then, there were some really weak shoots coming from the ground. But after a couple of years, they gathered some strength and then started to grow more vigorously,” Saarpuu says. So, it took around three years for these bushes to become viable and begin ‘flushing’ to produce leaf that could be used to process tea. According to Saarpuu, the land under cultivation has now grown to roughly sixty-seven acres.
The climate limits the growing season. “Usually we start towards the end of April, and we are finishing at the end of September,” says Saarpuu. I tell him that this is not dissimilar to the season in Darjeeling, India, where the high elevation also limits the harvest period. Saarpuu mentions that the plants they have used, being sourced in China, are likely to be of the same or similar variety as those grown in Darjeeling.
Interestingly, their labor profile is similar to Darjeeling’s as well with the pluckers being female and the males working in other areas. However, the workers are not unionized as in India, and Renegade must reach agreements with different groups one at a time. “They're sometimes a little bit like tribes so they kind of like do things together…and function as a tribe or a community,” says Saarpuu, adding: “If we make the agreements with the pluckers, it's not that we put the job ad up, and then…people come one-by-one. It's always done in groups, so each village, or each part of the village, has some kind of group leader with whom we do the negotiations about the terms, etc. And then they start to work.”
They also have similar labor problems experienced industry-wide in Georgia as the next generation of workers wants to migrate to cities and get jobs in other sectors. “We’re alright, currently, but maybe it’ll be a problem in the long run. I think the average age is maybe well, it's definitely more than 50 years at the moment, and every year we are losing few people because they no longer are fit to work on the fields…it’s difficult to find replacements. So, yeah, like, this is definitely a worry if you think about the next 10 or 15 years,” Saarpuu says.
Unlike Darjeeling, which despite being affected by climate change, has a moderate climate, Saarpuu’s gardens face extremes of weather. Western Georgia is known to have winters that bring quite a lot of snow, but summers can be very hot. Describing the three months between July and September, Saarpuu says the sun is quite intense and the days are long, being so far from the equator. It brings punishing heat. “It was like 40 days when it was more than 35 degrees,” he says of the past season.
I ask him how they cope with such blistering heat. He mentions that they are working on adding more shading trees to the more open areas. Still, he says it’s quite challenging for the tea bushes, especially those, which are South facing. During dry periods, there is no growth. However, it does rain sufficiently on average, with around 150-200 milliliters of rain falling each month, according to Saarpuu.
The high heat and dry periods have put the plants under considerable duress. However, as with other places, the tea plant, Camelia sinensis has proven to thrive under stress, even while facing the extreme conditions manifested at Renegade’s gardens. “This summer was also quite stressful for the plants because of the heat and periodic lack of rain. Yet we probably produced some of the best batches we have ever done, because the flavor profile, it was really nice and intense,” Saarpuu says.
Saarpuu claims that the tea from Renegade’s Georgian estates have a distinct flavor probably due to the unique conditions with which the plants must contend. In addition, the soil is quite acidic with pH of between 4 and 5. “If you look at the theory, it should be too acidic for tea, but we have so many soil types that it works,” says Saarpuu. Indeed, their terroir ranges from dry red clay to thick black soil, containing rich organic material. Also, not all the water they receive is from rain; they also get some mountain run-off from the Caucus range, which is totally free of chemical contaminants and mineral rich.
Unlike Darjeeling and other areas, Renegade does not pluck in distinct flushes though there is some differentiation. They produce white tea in early spring (a relatively smaller quantity compared to other varieties) then light black tea with batches gaingin more body as the season progresses. Green tea is produced consistently throughout the season. All told, they produce around twenty varieties of tea, seven of them being black – and that’s in part a result of experimentation and responding to customer feedback.
“Our philosophy from the beginning, has been to kind of see what we can get out of it because we are not focusing on big wholesale buyers. We are basically delivering or selling directly to the to the customers,” Saarpuu remarks.
The company’s outlook is quite positive because they have already established a brand name associated with quality. “It doesn't matter if you talk about the green tea or black tea. They are like sweet… and relatively smooth,” says Saarpuu. It’s a flavour profile, which their customers favor.
Renegade markets mainly to connoisseurs in Europe, and they do so through a distribution center, which they set up in Estonia. “We bring everything to Estonia, which is already in within EU [European Union]. So, shipping and distribution is not a really big challenge,” Saarpu asserts.
However, shipping to North America and Australia poses significant challenge due to mainly to the cost. To address this, Renegade is considering partnering with entities in those regions. That said their emphasis at present is not on looking for new markets. They have been selling out since the beginning, with many customers pre-ordering well in advance.
What they need is more supply. “Now that we’ve produced a high quality product, we’re looking to increase our productivity, so our yield goes up,” says Saarpuu. The company is also considering buying leaf from other suppliers to meet demand. It’s a good problem to have when demand exceeds supply.
Indeed, it’s tempting to jack up prices, but Saarpuu says the company doesn’t want the tea to be cost-prohibitive. Currently, the premium product commands a premium price – but the company could probably charge at higher rates and still sell out. Saarpuu says this is against their business model: “I would say [we] wanted to keep it accessible for also everyday users, not to focus on the very top end of the of the tea market. This was never the idea.”
The owners of Renegade Tea Estate view themselves as running a customer-friendly company, and with interest in the gardens coming from other countries in Europe, they have started organizing tours and are finding tea tourism to have potential. “Very few people have been actually to the tea estates,” he says, adding, “because in Europe there is no tea. So there is, yeah, quite a bit of interest, I think, but well, it's still underdeveloped. This year we had maybe 400 to 500, but most like well, they were exclusively for those guided tours where we basically do like [a] two-hour hike in which we give them like the overview of the plantations….We’ve started to build a tourist track but haven’t invested heavily into it, yet. The interest is there.”
It appears that the Renegade Tea Estate founders have built something new and innovative that really lives up to the former glory of Georgian tea. It’s something they are sharing with the rest of Europe and someday in the future, perhaps the rest of the world.
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