In 2017, we left our corporate careers in management and marketing in Estonia and Lithuania to do something different, something more meaningful and connected to nature. Becoming tea farmers in Georgia was never the plan. You can read the full stories of our founders from our blog, but let's just say that we didn't have a lifelong dream to become tea farmers and there was no big turning point that made us drop everything in our home countries. It started with a crazy idea, a few coincidences, and a healthy dose of curiosity.

That curiosity led us to the abandoned tea plantations of Georgia and the forgotten story of Georgian tea—how it had once been a thriving industry and then all but disappeared. The more we learned, the more hooked we became. The new understanding of how non-transparent the tea industry is, with little to no information about the origins when buying a box of tea at the supermarket, pushed us even more to start on a renegade journey in bringing Georgian tea back to the map and building the most transparent tea farm out there.

With no prior experience or knowledge about tea, we took a leap and restored 40 hectares of old plantations, learned the fundamentals of organic tea cultivation, figured out how to produce tea (and even won a few awards along the way), and slowly built a community of people who now get their yearly tea supply from Renegade Tea Estate.

It wasn’t always easy. There were moments of doubt, times when everything felt too much and the dream of bringing the tea plantations back to life seemed impossible. But the story of Georgian tea deserved a new chapter, and with a strong community of customers around us, our passion proved stronger than our fear.

With our Georgian tea farm now well established and increasingly in the hands of our local team, we’ve begun looking for new renegade stories and forgotten products from around the world to share with you. See our latest addition here.