I remember the exact moment — a small table at a café in Prague, October, the window so fogged you couldn't see the street below. The tea arrived in a simple white cup. No label, no story. Just something dark and smooth that tasted like smoke and old wood and somewhere I'd never been before. I went home thinking about it for months. That tea didn't just taste good. It went somewhere. And I didn't know how to get back.
Back home, I started looking for that feeling in every shop I walked into. I searched tea rooms, grocery aisles, specialty importers, farmers markets. I found plenty of options — dozens of blends with aspirational names and vague origin stories, marketed with language that promised the world and delivered something generic. Nothing that actually transported me. I kept thinking about that café in Prague, trying to figure out why that particular cup had stuck with me when so many others hadn't.
The gap was obvious: most teas are positioned for the cup, not the place. The sensory experience comes wrapped in universal words — smooth, soothing, refreshing, calming — stripped of anything specific enough to put you somewhere real.
I started blending for the place first. What does Prague smell like in October? What does the Serengeti feel like at dusk? I sourced ingredients around the answers — Lapsang souchong for smoke, rooibos for red earth, blood orange for the full weight of a Sicilian afternoon. Each blend became an argument: that a cup can hold a place.
The seven destinations weren't picked for romance or prestige. They were picked for specificity. Prague, Vienna, Sicily, the Serengeti, the Himalayas, Tibet, Patagonia — each one has a quality of air and light and unhurried time that nothing else in the world quite matches.
The teas are small-batch, blended in quantities I can actually taste and adjust by hand. I source loose leaf bases, fruit pieces, dried flowers, and spices from suppliers I've vetted for quality and consistency, then combine them until the blend does what I want it to: put you somewhere specific.
Each batch is roughly 500 cups' worth. Enough to get it right, not so much that I stop paying attention. If a blend drifts — if the rooibos runs lighter one season, if the jasmine shifts — I adjust before the next run goes out.
Chavena is the Portuguese word for teacup. Not xícara — that's the Brazilian Portuguese word. Chavena is specifically from Portugal, from a language shaped by the sea and centuries of trade. In Serbian, the same vessel is čaša. I chose the word because it points directly to the only thing that matters: the cup. Not the brand story, not the journey. Just the cup in your hands, right now, wherever you are.
Each tea comes as 4 oz of loose leaf — about 40 cups, depending on how strong you like it. The packaging is simple: a kraft bag with a label. No excess. Inside is just the tea and a small card with steep instructions and a short note written from wherever the blend was born.
The quality promise is uncomplicated: the ingredients are exactly what the label says. Every batch gets tasted before it ships. Nothing goes out that I wouldn't bring back in my own luggage from a trip.
If you're not sure where to start, start with The Tour — 7 destinations, one collection. It's the full map. Brew one cup at a time, wherever you happen to be.
Every cup is a small argument that an ordinary afternoon can hold something extraordinary. I hope you find one that takes you somewhere you didn't know you needed to go.
— Lior