Georgian tea is back, and it is good

An industry that basically disappeared, then quietly came back

At its Soviet-era peak, Georgia was one of the USSR’s main tea suppliers, with plantations across Guria, Adjara and Samegrelo feeding processing factories that shipped black tea across the entire union. The scale was genuinely large — by some estimates Georgia supplied a significant share of all tea consumed in the Soviet Union.

When the USSR collapsed, so did the guaranteed market, the state subsidies and much of the processing infrastructure in the same few years, and most plantations were abandoned outright, reverting to scrub within a decade or two. For most of the 1990s and 2000s, “Georgian tea” was not a phrase anyone outside the country would have recognised, and even inside Georgia it had largely been replaced on shop shelves by imported Ceylon and Indian tea.

What has happened since, roughly over the past decade, is a genuine small-scale revival rather than an industrial restart. A handful of growers — some working reclaimed Soviet-era bushes that survived decades of neglect, others planting new — have started producing black, green and increasingly specialty oxidised teas again, mostly in Guria and around Chiatura, sold in small batches rather than at the scale the Soviet industry once managed.

The quality, by most independent accounts, is genuinely good: the old Soviet bushes, many of them decades-old and never treated with modern agrochemicals because nobody could afford to, produce a tea that specialty buyers describe as comparable to some higher-end Chinese and Sri Lankan black teas, once properly processed.

Chiatura: Organic Tea Plantation Tour with Tasting visits one of the working revival plantations near Chiatura, with a tasting that walks through the difference between the mass-market Soviet-era product and what small growers are doing now. It pairs naturally with a Chiatura day that also covers the town’s Soviet-era cable cars — see Chiatura’s cable cars: the old ones and the new — since both sit within the same region and the same broader Soviet-industrial story, from very different angles.

What Georgian tea actually tastes like, and where to find it

The revival product is mostly sold as loose-leaf black tea with a malty, slightly smoky character that Georgian tea drinkers who remember the Soviet product describe as genuinely close to what their grandparents drank, rather than a modern reinvention. Green tea production exists but is smaller scale and harder to find outside specialty shops. None of it is available at the volume or price point of supermarket imported tea, and it is worth setting expectations accordingly — this is a boutique product being rebuilt from a near-total collapse, not a mainstream category competing on shelf space.

Spices and pantry goods to bring back and Dezerter Bazaar: how to shop it both touch on where to actually buy revival-era Georgian tea in Tbilisi, though the more reliable sources tend to be specialty tea shops in the city centre rather than the general market itself, which still stocks mostly imported tea by volume — see shopping in Tbilisi: markets, malls and design shops for the wider picture of where those specialty shops cluster.

The tea ceremony that is not quite a ceremony

Batumi: Artisan Ceramics Georgian Tea Ritual is worth flagging as something distinct from what “tea ritual” might suggest to anyone expecting a Japanese- or Chinese-style formal ceremony — Georgia does not have an equivalent inherited tradition of that kind, and this experience is better understood as a modern craft workshop pairing hand-thrown ceramics with tea tasting than as an ancient practice being revived. It is a pleasant, genuinely hands-on afternoon, just not one to book expecting centuries of ritual behind it.

Meanwhile, Tbilisi’s coffee scene needs no revival story at all

Unlike tea, coffee in Georgia was never a domestic agricultural product — the climate does not grow coffee — but Tbilisi’s specialty coffee scene has expanded fast over the past several years, largely independent of any Soviet-era baseline to recover from. Third-wave cafés roasting their own beans, often trained by or connected to the wider Eastern European and Baltic specialty coffee networks, have opened across Vera, Vake and the Old Town, to the point that a serious flat white or pour-over is no longer hard to find in central Tbilisi, which was not true a decade ago.

Coffee Crawl Tbilisi covers several of the city’s better-regarded specialty cafés in a single guided outing, useful for getting oriented quickly rather than discovering them one at a time over a longer stay. A slower, single-venue alternative also exists for anyone who would rather spend an hour on one proper tasting than cover several stops in an afternoon. Batumi: Through Coffee Aroma Walking Tour with Coffee Tasting folds coffee into a broader walking route through the neighbourhoods where the newer cafés have concentrated, which doubles as a decent introduction to Sololaki and Vera for anyone who has not explored those areas yet — see Sololaki: Art Nouveau doorways and painted stairwells for more on that specific area.

Where coffee culture and working remotely intersect

Tbilisi’s coffee scene has grown alongside, and partly because of, the city’s digital nomad population — cafés with reliable wifi, plug sockets and a tolerance for laptops open for several hours have become genuinely common, a shift that tracks closely with Georgia’s rise as a remote-work destination over the same period. Cafés in Tbilisi you can actually work from has the specific, name-checked list, and remote work and long stays in Tbilisi covers the wider practicalities for anyone considering a longer stay built around exactly this kind of café culture.

The Adjara plantations, and why Guria became the centre of the revival instead

The original Soviet tea industry actually concentrated more heavily in Adjara and Guria together, with Adjara’s climate — warmer, wetter, closer to the Black Sea — historically considered the better growing region of the two. The revival has skewed toward Guria regardless, partly because a larger share of Guria’s old plantations survived in a recoverable state, and partly because a small number of committed growers there simply started the work earlier than anyone did in Adjara.

This is slowly shifting: a handful of newer projects are now replanting in Adjara as well, closer to Batumi, though the scale remains modest compared with Guria’s head start. Anyone visiting Batumi specifically and curious about this side of Georgian agriculture is more likely, for now, to find it discussed than actually tasted locally — the more established tasting experiences still sit closer to Chiatura and Guria than to the coast itself.

What separates a good Georgian black tea from an ordinary one

For anyone buying rather than just tasting on a plantation visit, a few things distinguish the better revival-era product from the mass-market imported tea still filling most supermarket shelves. Leaf size and uniformity matter — the better small-batch producers hand-sort rather than machine-process at scale, which shows in a more even, less dusty leaf compared with standard bagged tea.

Origin transparency is another marker: a producer or estate name on the packaging, rather than a generic “Georgian tea” label with no further detail, generally signals a smaller, more accountable operation rather than a bulk blend. Price is a rough but useful proxy too — genuine small-batch revival tea costs meaningfully more than supermarket imported tea, and a suspiciously cheap product marketed as “traditional Georgian tea” is worth a second look before buying.

The traditional drink that predates both: churchkhela’s cousin, tarkhuna, and the everyday reality

Before either specialty coffee or revival tea, the actual everyday hot drink in most Georgian households, especially outside Tbilisi, has long been simple black tea — imported, unremarkable, drunk strong and usually with sugar rather than milk, alongside breakfast. What breakfast looks like in Georgia covers this ordinary, unglamorous version of Georgian tea culture, which is worth knowing about precisely because it is the opposite of the boutique revival story above — most Georgians, most mornings, are still drinking imported tea from a supermarket box, not a small-batch Guria black tea. Both things are true at once, and neither cancels the other out.

Bringing it home, and what customs actually allows

Both tea and coffee travel well and make sensible souvenirs compared with some of the more fragile options on a Georgian shopping list. Loose-leaf revival tea, bought sealed from a specialty retailer, has no particular customs restriction for personal quantities into the EU, UK or US, and the same applies to roasted coffee beans bought from a Tbilisi specialty roaster, several of which now package beans specifically for travellers to take home.

Customs, duty free and what you may take out covers the wider picture for anything more unusual — wine and spirits in particular carry actual limits that tea and coffee do not — worth checking if tea and coffee are only part of a longer shopping list that also includes a few bottles of Saperavi.

How to actually try both in a short visit

For a first-time visitor with limited time, the coffee side is easier to access — walk into any of a dozen specialty cafés in Vera or the Old Town and the quality bar is now genuinely high without needing to plan ahead. The tea revival is more deliberate: either the Chiatura plantation visit above, which requires a day trip, or seeking out one of the small number of specialty tea retailers in central Tbilisi that stock revival-era Georgian black tea by name and grower, which takes a bit more asking around than simply pointing at a café menu.

Frequently asked questions about Georgian tea and coffee

Is Georgian tea actually good, or is this mostly nostalgia?

By most specialty tasters’ accounts, genuinely good — the surviving Soviet-era bushes, decades old and never treated with modern chemicals due to decades of neglect, produce a malty black tea that compares favourably with mid-to-higher-end imported black teas once properly processed by small growers.

Where can I buy Georgian tea in Tbilisi?

Specialty tea shops in the city centre are the more reliable source; Dezerter Bazaar and general supermarkets stock mostly imported tea by volume, with only a small selection of domestic revival-era product if any.

Is Tbilisi’s coffee scene actually good, or is it overstated?

It has expanded significantly over the past several years and is now genuinely strong by regional standards, with a real cluster of third-wave, self-roasting cafés concentrated in Vera, Vake and parts of the Old Town.

Does Georgia grow its own coffee?

No — the climate does not support commercial coffee cultivation. All coffee served in Georgia is imported and roasted locally by specialty cafés, distinct from the domestically grown tea revival.

Is the tea ceremony experience an old Georgian tradition?

Not really — Georgia does not have an inherited formal tea ceremony tradition comparable to Japan’s or China’s. Workshop-style experiences pairing ceramics and tea tasting are a modern craft offering rather than a revived ancient ritual, and worth enjoying on those terms.