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Brewing up a storm in specialty tea at $1000 a cup

Rachel Wells
Rachel Wells

No trouble brewing: Hannah Dupree prepares an infusion at her Collingwood cafe, Storm in a Teacup.
No trouble brewing: Hannah Dupree prepares an infusion at her Collingwood cafe, Storm in a Teacup.Paul Jeffers

Melburnians are regularly paying up to $18 for a cup of tea at some city cafes, with the most expensive variety selling for $1000 a cup.

But these leafy drops are not of the kind derived from a Twinings tea bag or even from a teapot poured at your own leisure. Rather, Melbourne's most serious brewers are investing in high-tech boilers worth thousands of dollars and spending up to $100 for 100 grams of imported tea leaves, in pursuit of the perfect cup.

When Hannah Dupree opened Storm in a Teacup in Collingwood 18 months ago, she spent $4500 on an ecoboiler that enables her to boil water and keep it at a range of exact temperatures, according to the variety of tea.

She serves 35 varieties, including white, green, black and oolong, from $3.50 for a basic English Breakfast and up to $12 for a ''shade-grown'' Hawaiian white tea. She recently sold out of the Pre-Quing Ming Mao Jian - made from the first spring leaves of a Chinese tea plant, which cost $18 a cup. Her tea cocktails, including a jasmine gin and a matcha martini, cost between $10 and $20.

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''Different teas require different temperatures, ranging from 60 degrees for some Japanese green teas up to 100 degrees for your standard black teas. It's important to get that absolutely right and the boiler allows me to do that,'' Ms Dupree says.

''Infusion time is also critical. I don't send a pot out to the customer and get them to pour it whenever they think it's ready. That's our job. We brew all the teas at the counter and send the cups out when they are just right.''

Ms Dupree approaches her tea making in the same way Melbourne's passionate baristas approach coffee making - as an exact science. ''You wouldn't send out an espresso coffee and a jug of milk and ask someone to pour their own latte,'' she says.

Chrissie Trabucco from Assembly - a tea bar and retail store in Carlton that sells teas for up to $10 a cup - says a handful of cafe owners are now treating tea with the same respect they accord coffee.

''It's still a long way behind coffee in terms of appreciation of the nuances and the care that goes into making it,'' she says. ''But I think that's been driven by the industry. No one has really been interested in doing it well.''

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She says until recently some of the city's most astute coffee makers could not understand why you couldn't ''just bung some tea in the teapot, put some hot water from the coffee machine on top of it and drink it''.

She says that's slowly changing.

''People are producing really good teas really carefully and therefore we should be brewing them with the same care,'' she says. ''We even take the time to filtrate our water. It might sound finicky, but we are constantly testing it and seeing if we can improve it even further.''

She says customers are happy to pay ''a bit more'' for a cup of tea when they see the effort that goes into making it and ''once they taste it''.

''The way we've set up the shop means customers can see exactly what's happening. They know they're getting really high-quality tea and that that we're not just dumping it in a teapot but we're brewing it to the absolute best that we can.''

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Vue de Monde's tea sommelier, Charles Serveau, who serves a $1000 cup from a now-extinct tea plant, says tea is enjoying huge popularity right now.

''People like the health benefits and the different, complex tastes and because it can be matched well with different food,'' he says.

''They are paying for the quality of the tea leaves, the quality of the tea ware, the fact that I brew the tea for them. They appreciate that.''

Rachel WellsRachel Wells covers general and breaking news for The Age.

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