Georgia's Forgotten Tea Empire: From Soviet Fields to a New Era of Georgian Tea

Long before Georgian tea became a rare find for specialty-tea drinkers, the hills of western Georgia supplied tea to an entire empire. Today, a new generation is rediscovering what was almost lost.

There are tea regions that are famous because the world has always known their names.

Darjeeling. Uji. Fujian. Yunnan.

And then there is Georgia.

A country better known internationally for its wine, dramatic Caucasus Mountains, ancient architecture, and distinctive cuisine, Georgia also has a remarkable tea story—one that stretches from the nineteenth century through the Soviet era and into a quiet modern revival.

In the lush western regions of Georgia, tea has been cultivated for generations.

But for much of the twentieth century, Georgian tea was not produced primarily for discerning tea drinkers.

It was produced at scale. Enormous scale.

At its height, Georgia was the principal tea-producing region of the Soviet Union, with enough production to supply the vast domestic market. In 1985, the Georgian tea harvest reached approximately 152,000 tons, with nearly 70,000 hectares devoted to tea cultivation and roughly 180,000 people involved throughout the tea value chain.

Then the Soviet Union disappeared. And so, in many ways, did Georgia's tea industry. Today, something remarkable is happening. The tea gardens are returning.

The old knowledge is being reconsidered.

And Georgian tea is beginning to emerge from the shadow of its Soviet past as something entirely different: a tea of place, history, craftsmanship, and discovery.

Tea Finds a Home in Georgia

Georgia is one of the world's northernmost tea-growing countries.

That fact alone makes its tea story intriguing.

The country's western regions—particularly Guria, Imereti, Samegrelo, and Adjara—benefit from the humid, subtropical climate created by the Black Sea and the Caucasus landscape. The combination of rainfall, mild temperatures, and fertile soils created surprisingly favorable conditions for Camellia sinensis, the tea plant.

Tea cultivation began developing in Georgia during the nineteenth century.

There are several accounts of how tea first arrived, but Georgia's modern tea history is closely associated with western Georgia and particularly Guria. By the end of the nineteenth century, tea gardens were becoming part of the region's agricultural landscape.

The crop changed communities.

Families began cultivating tea.

Factories appeared.

Scientific research followed.

And tea became woven into the economic and cultural identity of western Georgia.

By the twentieth century, Georgia was no longer simply experimenting with tea.

It was becoming a tea-producing powerhouse.

Guria: The Heart of Georgian Tea

If Georgian tea has a geographical soul, it is found in Guria.

Nestled between the Black Sea and the Lesser Caucasus, Guria offers the kind of lush, humid environment that tea plants appreciate.

The landscape is beautiful in a way that almost feels improbable for a major tea-producing region.

Green hills.

Dense vegetation.

Mountain air.

Abundant rainfall.

And tea gardens stretching across the countryside.

During the Soviet era, tea became an economic cornerstone of Guria. Thousands of workers were employed in cultivation, harvesting, processing, research, and factory operations. The industry was not simply something that happened in the region.

It shaped the region.

Tea became work.

Tea became livelihood.

Tea became infrastructure.

And, for generations of Georgians, tea became part of everyday life.

The scale was extraordinary.

By the 1980s, Georgia's tea-growing landscape extended across tens of thousands of hectares. Its production supplied the Soviet Union's enormous appetite for tea.

But scale came with a cost.

When Quantity Became the Priority

The Soviet tea system was designed to accomplish something very specific: produce enough tea for millions of people.

Quality was important, but volume was paramount.

Large plantations were managed for efficiency. Mechanized harvesting became widespread. Leaves were often harvested with machines rather than carefully plucked by hand, and the resulting material could include older leaves and stems.

The tea that emerged from this system developed a reputation for being functional rather than exceptional.

This is an important part of Georgia's tea history because it helps explain a misconception that still follows Georgian tea today.

Georgian tea was not necessarily incapable of quality.

The system was simply designed around a different objective.

It was built to feed a massive market.

And once the Soviet Union collapsed, the market that had supported that enormous production system disappeared.

1991: The Industry Collapses

The collapse of the Soviet Union changed Georgian tea almost overnight.

The centralized system that had connected tea gardens, factories, research institutions, transportation, and consumers across the USSR fractured.

Factories closed.

Equipment deteriorated.

Plantations were abandoned.

Some tea gardens became so overgrown that they were eventually difficult to recognize as tea plantations at all.

Georgia went from being a major tea producer to a country whose tea industry had almost disappeared.

By 2016, official figures showed Georgian tea production had fallen by 99 percent from its 1985 peak—a collapse documented by Reuters and explored in depth by The Guardian.

Imagine that for a moment.

A tea industry that had once employed approximately 180,000 people across its value chain was reduced to a fraction of its former scale.

The tea gardens remained.

The plants remained.

The knowledge remained in families and communities.

But the system surrounding them was gone.

And for decades, much of Georgia's tea heritage seemed destined to become a footnote.

But Tea Has a Long Memory

Tea is an unusually patient crop. Old bushes can survive.

Abandoned gardens can remain productive. And knowledge can travel quietly from one generation to another.

That is part of what makes Georgia's contemporary tea revival so compelling.

The revival did not begin with a blank sheet of paper.

It began with what remained.

Old plantations. Family knowledge. Former tea scientists. Agricultural traditions. Abandoned factories. And people who remembered what tea had once meant to their communities.

Beginning in the 2000s and accelerating in the following decades, entrepreneurs, farmers, researchers, international organizations, and government programs began working to rehabilitate Georgia's tea sector. UNDP-supported initiatives, for example, helped small farmers bring Georgian tea back toward international markets.

The objective, however, is different this time. Not volume. Character.

The New Georgian Tea

Today's Georgian tea revival is not attempting to recreate the Soviet tea industry exactly as it was.

That would miss the opportunity.

Instead, a new generation of producers is asking a more interesting question:

What can Georgian tea become?

The answer is increasingly found in small-batch production, hand harvesting, organic and chemical-free cultivation practices, careful processing, terroir, and direct relationships with specialty markets.

Producers are reclaiming neglected tea gardens and experimenting with processing techniques designed to reveal rather than obscure the character of the leaf.

This is a profound shift.

The Soviet system asked: How much tea can Georgia produce?

The emerging specialty-tea movement asks: What does Georgian tea taste like when we allow the place itself to speak?

What Makes Georgian Tea Distinctive?

The answer begins with geography.

Georgia sits at an unusual intersection of Europe and Asia, along the historic Silk Road.

Its western tea regions experience a maritime-influenced subtropical climate unlike the conditions found in many of Asia's better-known tea-growing regions.

The Black Sea brings moisture.

The Caucasus creates dramatic changes in elevation and landscape.

And the long growing season supports tea cultivation in a region far north of the classic tea-growing belt.

The result can be a tea with a distinctive combination of smoothness, natural sweetness, gentle astringency, and earthy or mineral character, depending on the region, cultivar, harvest, and processing method.

This is precisely why provenance matters.

A Georgian tea should not be expected to taste like a Chinese tea.

It should not be expected to imitate a Taiwanese tea.

And it should not need to.

The opportunity is to understand Georgian tea on its own terms.

From Guria to Imereti

While Guria may be the emotional heart of Georgia's tea story, it is not the country's only tea-growing region.

Imereti, in western Georgia, has also developed a distinctive tea identity.

It is here that Symphony of Leaves sources the tea for our Silk Road Black Breakfast.

The tea comes from the lush Imereti region, where tea cultivation dates back to the nineteenth century. The combination of Georgia's subtropical climate, abundant rainfall, mineral-rich soils, and proximity to the Caucasus creates the foundation for a black tea with a character that is smooth, naturally sweet, and quietly captivating.

This is exactly the kind of tea we seek at Symphony of Leaves.

Not simply a tea from a country.

A tea with a story.

A tea with a sense of place.

A tea that gives the drinker another way to experience the world.

Georgian Black Tea: A Different Kind of Breakfast Tea

The phrase breakfast tea often brings to mind familiar British blends—strong, brisk, malty, and designed to perform beautifully with milk.

Georgian black tea offers another interpretation.

Our Silk Road Black Breakfast is a single-origin Georgian black tea from Imereti.

It is smooth rather than aggressive.

Naturally sweet rather than heavily flavored.

Structured enough for the morning, yet nuanced enough to drink without milk.

The name is intentional.

Georgia sits along one of the world's most historically significant trade routes—the Silk Road, where people, ideas, spices, textiles, and goods traveled between East and West.

Tea was part of that broader story of exchange.

Today, the cup offers another kind of journey.

One that moves from the Georgian tea gardens of Imereti to your table.

Explore Georgian Tea

Georgia's tea story is one of resilience, rediscovery, and quiet excellence—and it is available in limited quantities. If you are ready to experience it for yourself, our Silk Road Black Breakfast Loose Leaf Tea is your invitation—a single-origin black tea from the Imereti region, smooth, naturally sweet, and steeped in centuries of history. Available in limited quantities while the harvest lasts.

Shop Silk Road Black Breakfast →

Sip purposefully.