About Eshai
We are a small, family-run business, and we love spending our days blending and packaging traditional and exotic teas in the magical hinterland of Byron Bay.
Life is filled with magic… if you know where to look
If you've ever seen the magic in something that other people missed, you'll understand how we feel about tea. While it may seem a humble little beverage, tea has been central to social life, inner peace, wellness, and hospitality for centuries. Since its beginnings (believed to stretch back more than 5,000 years ago), tea has been charming people with its unique and paradoxical ability to impart peace, harmony, and well-being, while at the same time banishing fatigue, stimulating the mental powers, and boosting energy levels.
This remarkable little beverage also creates space to slow down in the day, reflect, and connect with your inner being, your family, and your friends. Uniting people to share, talk, and love is a sentiment that lives on in all tea drinking cultures around the world. It's little wonder this enchanting brew is the world's favourite drink (not counting water, of course!)
Our fascination with the alchemy of tea making, and our love for tea drinking and sharing, are what inspired us to recreate the traditional and ceremonial teas from around the world. Inspired by these marvellous historical blends, we couldn't stop ourselves from delving in deeper, reimagining tea with the help of modern technology and innovations. The delectable concoctions that have arisen from this creative exploration allow us to balance the beauty and tradition of the past with the adventurous spirit of the future.
The meaning of Eshai
Celebrating our differences and our uni-tea, Eshai is all about creating a bridge between cultures through the shared love of tea.
Humans and tea: an evolutionary love story
We are proud to uphold the traditions, the rituals and the experiences of tea making, drinking and sharing in respect of all tea loving cultures. Our name – Eshai – reflects the ancientness of tea and is derived from the Arabic word ‘as-shai’ or ‘the tea’ as it is directly translated into English. A journey into the history of tea reveals that the word ‘shai’ or ‘chai’ is derived from the Chinese word ‘cha.’ The first cultivated tea gardens are believed to have been established in China during the early days of the dawn of recorded history. In the West, our familiarity with the word ‘chai’ has been a more recent phenomenon due to the rise in popularity of the milky and delicious Indian spiced tea, masala chai – ‘masala’ being spices and ‘chai’ referring to tea.
We have chosen the word 'Eshai' for our range of teas because it acknowledges the common origin of 'tea', while celebrating the incredible evolution of this drink into so many distinctive flavours and cultural traditions.