Surprisingly tea-riffic: Maleny’s unexpected plantation temptation

Darryl and Brendon harvest the tea.

Arakai Estate is a project between Darryl and Loraine Collins, right, and their son, Brendon, and his wife, Kristie.

by Janine Hill

THINK of where tea is grown and you will probably picture plantations in China, Sri Lanka or India – not Maleny.

But at Booroobin, south-west of Maleny, a family has made a go of growing the wordwide beverage favourite.

Arakai Estate, a project between Darryl and Loraine Collins and their son, Brendon, and his wife, Kristie, harvests five to six tonnes of tea a year. 

Darryl, a cabinetmaker, originally bought 170ha of land for a timber plantation but after selling his business, had no need to grow trees.

However, instead of selling the land, he and Brendon began exploring other potential income-producing options for the property.

“It would have been 2009-2010 that we first got the idea of tea and that came from Landline, one of the ABC’s TV shows,” Brendon said.

“Before that, we’d been looking at ginger as a possibility but it wasn’t really viable.”

They planted Japanese green tea plants – the only sort they could get in Australia in those days and were harvesting about five years after they started looking at the idea.

Their first crop was so successful that they won Australia’s Golden Leaf award for green tea in 2015. “We didn’t even have a label. We were handing out tea to try in little zip-lock plastic bags,” 

Brendon said the area had turned out to be ideal for growing tea.

“It grows whether you want it to or not. We harvest five or six times a year. There’s about four months of the year when it’s cold and doesn’t grow and that gives us a chance to concentrate on other things.”

Some of the tea is sold under the Arakai name through online orders and some is sold on for use in blended teas.

Brendon said one of the attractions of tea was that it was a product they could not only grow but process, package and sell themselves.

“We wanted a product that we could handle ourselves. We wanted to do something different and we certainly found that.”

The Collinses process using an oolong-type method which involves letting the tea leaves dry out before they can begin processing.  They produce five flavours: green, black, and summer, spring and autumn.

Brendon said they had found the tea lasted exceptionally well. 

“We try and keep it stored very well. I’m still drinking tea from 2017. The way we pack and ‘store tea, it ‘ages’ better.

“We had a ‘best before’ date of two years and we’ve extended that out to four years but I’m drinking tea that’s six or seven years old.”

Brendon and Darryl have kept records of each harvest to learn how to optimise their growing and processing.

“People want to call us master tea growers but I wouldn’t say that. Things are always changing and we’re always learning,” Brendon said.

Aside from tea, the Collinses have 500 avocado trees to look after, grow a small amount of ginger to be sold as seed, host occasional timber harvesting, and run after Brendon and Kristie’s two young children.