Inside Blak Brews’ bid to make tea as prestigious as fine wine

“The classic ‘pinky-up’ tea drinker isn’t our core market.” This is what Blak Brews founder Troy Benjamin told me.Tea occupies a strange position in the global beverage hierarchy: The second-most-consumed drink in the world after water, yet in Australia’s hospitality economy it has long been treated as an afterthought, a teabag, a saucer, or occasionally a shrug. Coffee commands ritual and wine commands reverence, but tea, despite its history and scale, has rarely commanded margin. Blak Brews is on a trajectory to change that.Long before Blak Brews appeared on premium restaurant lists or Benjamin won Gordon Ramsay’s Food Stars, he was working in hospitality in regional Victoria, running the espresso machine and watching purchasing patterns unfold in real time.“In 2010, I bought my first café, so I’ve been a barista and around beverages in customer-facing hospitality for a long time,” he recounted. “It was very obvious that no one was really buying tea, even though it’s the second-most-consumed beverage in the world. In cafés, no one respected a cup of tea the way they did coffee.”For a category worth billions globally, tea occupies a strangely diminished cultural space. As Benjamin watched cheese and wine ascend into a sort of premium ritual and coffee transformed through the language of origin and process, it occurred to him that tea had been left behind. Not because it lacked complexity, but because no one had insisted on telling its story properly.“I started seeing parallels with other categories (cheese, wine) where people became interested in origin, how it’s made, and provenance. Coffee and wine had made that journey, but tea hadn’t.”The insight was not necessarily philosophical. Australia did not have an emblematic tea brand built around native flavour, terroir and story.“There wasn’t necessarily a gap for just another Australian product,” Benjamin said. “But there was a gap for an iconic tea – an iconic Australian beverage. We don’t really have one. Everything’s imported. We don’t have that emblematic product that showcases Australian flavour authentically.”The origin story of Blak Brews is domestic in scale but global in ambition. As Covid restrictions eased, Benjamin and his wife, Cerisa, who had been exploring an essential oils concept using native herbs, reconnected with a world tea master in Geelong. Benjamin’s family friend, a global spokesperson for tea, was drying and blending native botanicals.“She mentioned there was strong international interest in native ingredients,” Benjamin recalled. “That got me thinking, could this be a tea brand? She was excited about the idea, especially hearing it from a First Nations person. She said, ‘Troy, you could be the face of a tea brand that celebrates Australia.’ That sounded real and scalable, even global.”From desert festival to fine diningThe first validation did not come from buyers or distributors. It came from a desert festival in the Macedon Ranges. The couple took early blends into the field, offering tastings directly to consumers.“The response was impossible to ignore,” Benjamin said. “People said it was better than what they were drinking, and when they found out it was Australian-grown, they were proud to buy it.”Blak Brews began with friends, family and a website, then accelerated through markets and events.But unlike many emerging brands that remain tethered to weekend foot traffic, the couple understood that long-term margin in beverages comes from hospitality and institutional placement.When the opportunity arose to operate a café within a local Aboriginal cultural centre, a space that had served the community for three decades before being acquired by an Aboriginal co-operative, the couple stepped in as custodians.“The café came after Blak Brews,” Benjamin explained. “The space had been a cultural centre for 30 years and was acquired by the local Aboriginal co-op. We took over the café component, so we’re caretakers of it. It’s a café within a cultural centre and, yes, we sell tea there. The menu is designed like a wine list – premium, intentional. That’s how I envisioned it.”Sommelier-led experiencesThat wine-list framing is strategic repositioning and as alcohol consumption moderates among younger consumers and venues search for elevated non-alcoholic pairings, tea offers complexity without alcohol.“Restaurants are also looking for exciting non-alcoholic options,” Benjamin explained. “We’re seeing strong interest because of quality, origin, sustainability and food pairing.”One of the most visible validations of that strategy is Melbourne restaurant Yiaga, led by former Vue de Monde head chef Hugh Allen. The venue offers curated non-alcoholic pairings and uses Blak Brews as its preferred tea program. In that environment, tea is integrated into tasting menus, positioned alongside sommelier-led beverage experiences.“When we’re in restaurants, we’re often contacted by wine sommeliers,” Benjamin said. “We’re learning about flavour and pairing from chefs and sommeliers, which has been incredible.”For an FMCG operator, that feedback loop is gold. It sharpens product development, informs SKU rationalisation and builds credibility at the premium end of the market. It also shapes distribution discipline.After appearing on Gordon Ramsay’s Food Stars – a platform that amplified brand visibility overnight – Blak Brews faced a challenge familiar to many televised start-ups: scale without dilution.“After the show, we said yes to too many stockists and ended up dealing with complaints, out-of-stocks, pricing issues, misrepresentation,” Benjamin said. “We pulled everything back.”In FMCG, distribution is a delicate balance. Too little and a brand stalls; too much and it risks losing the very prestige it’s trying to build.“There’s no better way to represent our product than ourselves – packing, blending and shipping from our warehouse. High-end venues want confidence that the brand isn’t diluted. We now gatekeep much more carefully. Wholesale enquiries involve a 15- to 20-minute conversation. We’re serious about where and how the brand shows up.”Gordon Ramsay’s sage adviceBenjamin spent time with Gordon Ramsay following his appearance on Food Stars, and Ramsay made the point plainly: If Blak Brews wanted to be taken seriously in high-end kitchens, supermarket ubiquity would work against it.That approach now shapes how the brand appears in the market. “Because of that, we’ve shifted away from markets and toward premium, exclusive placements. You won’t see us in takeaway cups or mass discounting.”Sourcing, meanwhile, is both the brand’s backbone and its potential pressure point. Native botanicals can be seasonal, fragmented and supply constrained. Yet Benjamin describes a supply chain that has matured in parallel with demand. “Demand has increased, which has helped scale supply,” he said. “We’ve been strategic in how blends are built, so we’re not overly reliant on rare ingredients. We bring everything back to our warehouse so we can manage quality directly. If something shifts seasonally, we communicate with customers and fix it quickly. We haven’t had major supply issues, which is a credit to the industry.”That vertical oversight of blending, packing and shipping in-house gives Blak Brews operational agility, while reinforcing authenticity in a category where provenance is central to value.What sets the brand apart from other tea labels is not simply its use of native ingredients. It is the reframing of tea as a premium, place-based experience anchored in First Nations identity and contemporary hospitality.Remember, “The classic ‘pinky-up’ tea drinker isn’t our core market,” Benjamin said. The line is sharp, but the implication is serious. Blak Brews is courting relevance, not nostalgia.The ambition is unapologetically global. “Two main areas,” he said. “First, brand placement – being in the top 50 bars and premium venues globally. Second, working with hotels to redesign the guest experience through tea.”Hotel collaborations are already under way, including brew bar concepts designed to move tea service away from the quiet anonymity of the sachet and toward something closer to ceremony. The brand is also beginning to stretch outward into adjacent territory, partnering with Mischief Brew and experimenting with new formats such as a charcoal and lemon myrtle lip-care range.The desert festival tastings, the cultural centre café, the televised pitch, the recalibrated wholesale strategy – each stage looks, in hindsight, like a small adjustment in how the business balances story with structure.What Blak Brews proposes is something slightly different to the heritage tea brands that have long defined the category: tea that is Australia, steeped and served. Not as a novelty, and not as a souvenir, but as a serious contender in a beverage category that has spent decades hiding in plain sight.Tea, after all, is the second-most-consumed drink in the world, and in Australia’s food culture, it may finally be approaching its first truly modern chapter.This story was featured in the July edition of Inside FMCG.