Quench your thirst with Christchurch tea maker Leeya Warrander
Christchurch tea maker Leeya Warrander has turned her passion for working with nature into a business, creating a uniquely different tea range from soil to cup.
NEW ZEALAND’S TEA LANDSCAPE IS CHANGING. Once Kiwi’s go-to beverage of choice, the advent of the café culture in the 1990s coupled with rising costs saw teadrinking habits change in favour of lattes and flat whites. But today it’s experiencing a renaissance with niche operators like Leeya Warrander, founder of Mikaku Tea Blends, handcrafting unique artisanal blends.
From an early age, Leeya showed a passion for the creative, whether it be whipping up delicious family meals, making potions or painting. Not knowing what to study when she left school, she started working in a café. Back then Leeya didn’t even know that being a ‘tea maker’ was an actual career. She grew up drinking mostly your stockstandard supermarket varieties shipped in from abroad.
Over time though, she started examining what she was drinking. As her interest in tea peaked, she discovered other Christchurch tea stores where you could buy flower bombs, bubble cup and smell a wide array of different teas.
Though she found plenty of fruity blends she liked the taste of, Leeya was surprised to learn that although they were sold by New Zealand companies, they used imported ingredients, produced en masse and packaged in tea bags. Most contained enhancers or different types of traditional Camellia sinensis. ‘It got me thinking,’ she says. ‘It can’t be that hard to make your own, so I started experimenting with an apple and rhubarb tea.’
That led her to create her own range of delicious herbal fruit teas designed for home and hospitality utilising a wide array of carefully selected organic fruits and berries, herbs and flowers collected mainly from her own garden in Governors Bay, or foraged locally. Additional ingredients (mostly herbs that don’t grow in New Zealand) are sourced from a local organic herb company. Each was lovingly processed, dried and hand-blended in small batches.
With the natural health and vitality segment booming, Leeya could have easily gone down the dispensary-style herbal tea route, but chose not to. ‘For me, I don’t have the knowledge or passion for it. Some are more of a medicine than an enjoyable drink. Though I have always been interested in holistic medicine, I wanted to create a range of delicious fruity teas with no artificial flavours for people to enjoy. It had to be about flavour first.
‘At the start there was a lot of trial and error getting that perfect balance, trialling different ingredients and flavour combinations,’ she says. ‘Using my skills from cooking, Mikaku blends were inspired by some classic flavour combinations I was already enjoying. Starting with a base I build layer by layer, adding fruits, spices and blooms, always being careful not to add too much. It’s all about balance; the ratios are so important. Lemon and ginger needed to be about lemon and ginger.’
Those early blends included Three Peach, Apple and Rhubarb, Deluxe Berry, Lemon and Ginger, Native Citrus, Peppermint Wellness, Chamomile Zen, Coconut Lime and Summer Rooibos.
Her fruit teas proved an instant success. ‘Initially I sold to the Lyttelton gift store supporting local makers and then a few markets. I was trying to make teas that didn’t exist but once cafés started to express interest in serving Mikaku Tea they requested tea options like English breakfast and green.’ Leeya duly responded, extending the range to 14.
By that stage, she knew the business had wings, but while her children were young it had always been a hobby.
Just when she was ready to up the ante, COVID-19 hit. ‘The global pandemic felt like a bit of a handbrake,’ says Leeya. ‘I was ready to keep going. A lot of places wanted to stock it but I wasn’t ready for them.’
After spending a year going back and forth with a designer to come up with the ideal design, logo and packaging, her new packaging finally arrived last August.
She launched her retail line, which features eight of her most popular blends, in November 2020.
The whole process has been a vertical learning curve for Leeya. ‘From the blending to sales and marketing I am wearing many hats,’ she says. ‘I’ve learnt so much along the way. I had absolutely no sales experience, so I have had to learn how to pitch it to different companies. But it’s been well received. People are genuinely interested in the fact that it’s mostly grown and blended here. Its success gives me the fuel to keep on going.’
She also accentuates the sustainability angle. ‘Caring for the planet and working with nature is our underlying
‘People are genuinely interested in the fact that it’s mostly grown and blended here. Its success gives me the fuel to keep on going.’
principle. We are a local company with sustainable practices trying to do everything from soil to cup. All my teas are loose leaf to avoid consuming any plastic, glues or chemicals,’ says Leeya. She uses only organic gardening techniques, harvesting small amounts often, leaving plenty for birds and bees. Their packaging is also sustainable. They supply tea in home-compostable bags, and its cardboard box is reusable or recyclable. What her back garden can’t supply, or what can’t be found in the wild she tries to source locally.
Today, it’s a full-time job that Leeya can fit in around the needs of her children, aged nine and four. With demand growing, she has recently employed someone to help with doing everything from gardening and picking, to cutting, drying, blending and bagging.
The Mikaku Tea Blends range of delicious brews is now served in around a dozen restaurants and cafés in Christchurch, as well as a handful in Dunedin. Leeya’s new retail range is now sold in several gift shops across
Leeya uses only organic gardening techniques, harvesting small amounts often, leaving plenty for birds and bees.
Christchurch, one in Palmerston North, and a push further afield is planned with interest growing in Auckland and Wellington. She also offers refill bags, gift boxes and monthly subscriptions through her website, and is looking at expanding subscriptions into offices and workplaces.
With her business taking flight, Leeya plans to increase her presence in Christchurch, starting with regular stalls at both Lyttelton and Opawa markets. She’s recently purchased an old horse float and is in the process of renovating it into a portable tea studio complete with samples and hot tea options. ‘Going to the markets is my next big project. I’m looking forward to getting it [my tea] in front of different people, so they can see it and try it,’ she says.
Though it’s been some time since Leeya has created a new blend, she’s excited to see what people want next. ‘It’s really nice to have suggestions that inspire that creative process.’ While the possibilities are endless, she’s careful to ensure that each new tea is completely different from the ones she has tried before or is already creating.
Next on her list is a new chai tea. ‘I’ve had lots of requests from people for a chai tea and I’ve been working on it for some time. A sticky chai, blended with honey and spices that’s designed to be brewed in a more ritualistic process than your average cup of gumboot tea,’ she explains.
But Leeya is perhaps most excited about growing her intuitive tea blending workshops. Having always been interested in meditation and yoga, the workshops take people on a sensual journey where they get to blend their own unique tea from a large supply of dried fruits, herbs, spices and blooms. They conclude with a mindful tea ceremony where she guides them through the process of preparing, brewing and tasting one of the Mikaku tea blends.
‘The tea experience can be so much more than a hot drink when we slow down and notice our environment, paying attention to our senses and sensations. All the smells, the temperature, the tastes and how they develop before, during and after we bring the cup to our lips. Adding tea to your daily practice can offer nourishment for the body, mind and soul.’
Long-term she would love to be able to grow and process her own Camellia sinensis, one of the two main plant varieties grown worldwide, harvested for white, yellow, green, oolong, pu-erh and black tea. But given Christchurch’s climate that would require a large-scale greenhouse. ‘One day,’ smiles Leeya.