Maison Kettle started with a cola habit, a kitchen full of experiments, and one cup of whole-leaf tea in a small room in Srinagar.
Until a few years ago, my drink was cola. I loved it and drank an almost embarrassing amount of it every day. But I'm a tinkerer, and readymade things eventually start to nag at me, so I set out to make my own, better version. That turned into years of hot brews and cold brews with every base I could think of, until tea won. Cheap CTC dust from the corner shop, buried under sugar, flavoured with whatever fruit or spice looked promising that week. The drinks were good. Some were very good. But none of them had the finer notes I was after, the kind of cup that sits closer to perfume than to syrup.
Where the real leaf grows.
What changed everything was a long stretch of backpacking through the north and east of the country. Back home in Indore, coffee had become a whole culture. People sat in cafés debating water temperature for a single roast while tea stayed the cheap fix you drank standing up. Out on the treks I found the opposite: small tea rooms and brewers who treated the leaf the way those cafés treated their beans, a craft that began at the farm, long before any kitchen. In one of them, in Srinagar of all places, I drank my first cup of whole-leaf tea. I carried home every sampler they would sell me.
Those leaves were a different thing entirely. They steeped for days without a trace of bitterness and filled the whole house with fragrance. I brewed them hot and cold, made kombucha with them, and worked through every last gram. Then came the discovery this company is built on: you cannot buy the best Indian tea in India. The finest lots are graded, auctioned and shipped abroad within days of plucking, and even the specialty sellers end up with the second pick. Most people here have never seen a whole tea leaf. They think tea is a black powder.
Before all this
Cola, mostly
An almost embarrassing amount of it, every day, and a growing itch to make something better.
The kitchen years
Tea enters, badly
Cheap CTC dust and a mountain of sugar. Good drinks, never great ones.
2024
A cup in Srinagar
A small tea room, a first taste of whole leaf, and every sampler they would sell.
Nov 2025
Batch zero
The first garden deal, done on a handshake. Sixty tins, never sold, given to friends who told us the truth about it.
Mar 2026
Batch one
Two hundred and twenty tins of first flush. Gone in nineteen days.
Today
Batch by batch
Five teas, five gardens, one ledger. When a batch is gone, it's gone.
The country that grows the finest tea on earth drinks the floor sweepings.
The problem, in one sentence
Maison Kettle is what I did about it. The plan, such as it is: bring the best tea in the world back to the country that grows it. We buy whole lots from named gardens, whole leaf only, and every lot becomes one batch. Plucked in a named week, tinned within thirty days, numbered by hand. The number is a receipt, not a slogan. Write to us with yours and we'll tell you the plucking dates, the garden, and what the weather was doing that fortnight. We're small on purpose, so batches sell out, flavours drift between harvests, and we say no a lot. We think that's what tea is supposed to be like. The alternative is on every supermarket shelf, consistent as cardboard.
