PekoeTea
Founded in 2008 by Esther Kungu-Cooper and Jon Cooper, who have more than 20 years of experience in the tea industry, every delicious blend in the PekoeTea range is built on strong relationships with artisan tea growers, and suppliers both in Scotland and around the world.
Crafted by an expert team in Leith, Edinburgh, PekoeTea’s luxury hand-blended and flavoured tea collection features everything from classic breakfast to green, oolong, fruit and herbal blends, ensuring there’s a pour for every palate.
In this Q&A, Jon explores the process behind some of PekoeTea’s most innovative flavours, and discusses the importance of sourcing local ingredients from some of Scotland’s best producers.
Scottish Food & Drink September
Your range of hand-blended teas offers some distinctive and unique flavours – how does innovation play a role in your product and recipe development process?
Within the tea industry there is no go to manual on how to blend and flavour teas. We have spent the last seven years working out how to make our blends in the best way with interesting ingredients. Our most innovative blends have included our range of teas made with real single malt Scotch whisky, but we have also blended a complimentary infusion for a luxury spa that uses Scottish oats, and teas made with vegan chocolate from Ecuador or pieces of hand-made Scottish fudge.
You often team up with other local businesses for special collaborations, and also have a range of Scottish grown teas – how important is it to champion the produce, growers and businesses on our doorstep?
Provenance is so important and picking locally sourced ingredients adds to the quality and the story of the products we make. We have recently changed out all our freeze-dried strawberries to Scottish grown, we source fudge from The Fudge House of Edinburgh, and our oats are also from Scotland.
Our whisky teas are the only ones in the world where the teas are made by adding the whisky to the teas during the blending process. The Scottish grown tea we sell is from Kinnettles Tea Garden and was the first commercially available Scottish grown tea. This year is the 10th anniversary.
What is your most popular blend – or perhaps your own personal favourite?
Our most popular blends are our whisky teas but, for myself, I start every day with a mug of Breakfast tea – this was the final blend to be brought in-house making 100% of our blends made from scratch by us. I am very proud of our Breakfast blend and something that I couldn't live without.
Do you use any innovative tools or techniques to get the most out of your ingredients?
We had to invent our own blending processes – which we currently keep under wraps – but some of our techniques include multiple stage blending, which is a big part of how some of our blends are made – getting the ingredients in the correct order can make a big difference to the finished blend. Our biggest asset is the open mindedness of my team.
How do you blend tradition with innovation?
We know that we need to appeal to traditional tea drinkers as well as the next generation who are looking for something a bit different. We have quite a big range of ingredients, which enables us to not only make more traditional blends, such as Earl Grey, but also use the same techniques and expertise to experiment with other types of blends such as Gin & Tonic flavoured tea or our Leith Lights blends that is made from ingredients that can naturally generate electricity.
Our retail store in Edinburgh has a tea bar, where our entire range can be enjoyed. We make our single estate Chinese teas in the Gong Fu style but you can also enjoy one of our hand-made blends in a more modern way. Currently we are working towards pairing our Scottish teas and Japanese teas with different Scottish waters, so they will be served with water chosen specifically for that tea to bring out the best flavours.