What was there
TeaHQ's own reading of well-attested general knowledge, with no single source behind it.
Georgia’s west is humid, acidic-soiled and mild, and tea grows there readily — one of the very few places in Europe where it does at commercial scale. Through the Soviet period Georgian tea was planted, mechanised and expanded enormously, and it supplied a large share of a very large internal market, with Azerbaijani and Krasnodar production alongside it. The product was overwhelmingly machine-harvested bulk black tea made for volume, and its reputation within that market was mixed for reasons of grade rather than of terroir. TeaHQ states the general shape and does not quantify any of it. The scale is the part that is hard to convey now. Whole districts were organised around tea, with factories, transport and a workforce built for it, and the crop was a significant part of the regional economy. A visitor to western Georgia today walking through what looks like scrub is frequently walking through tea, because the bushes did not die when the industry did.
The collapse
TeaHQ's own reading of well-attested general knowledge, with no single source behind it.
The market that Georgian tea existed to supply disappeared with the Soviet Union, and it took the industry with it: the purchasing structure, the transport, the factories and the assured offtake all went at once, in a country simultaneously dealing with conflict and economic breakdown. Plantations were abandoned, factories stripped, and planted area fell by an order that is described in every account as catastrophic and is not quantified here. Tea bushes are perennial and long-lived, so the plantations did not disappear; they went feral, and much of the old area is now bushes growing wild among returning forest. This is an unusual thing in tea and it has an unexpected consequence. Georgia now has a large quantity of old, unsprayed, unmanaged tea growing on land nobody is farming, which is a resource of a kind that no other country has in that form, and it is the physical basis of everything in the next section.
The revival, at its actual size
A description of something people do now, compiled from published accounts rather than from practice.
Since the 2000s a small number of producers, cooperatives and enthusiasts have been making tea again from the old plantations — hand-picked, hand-processed, in small quantities, as green, black, white and oolong-style teas rather than as bulk black — and selling into speciality markets in Europe and beyond. The teas are genuinely interesting: old seed-grown plants, unsprayed for decades, worked by hand. There is also state and donor interest in rehabilitating plantations, and some larger commercial planting. TeaHQ records the revival as real and as very small relative to what was lost. The honest framing is that Georgia is a speciality curiosity with a large industrial past rather than a producing country in recovery. That may change. What a reader should take from it now is that a Georgian tea on a speciality shelf is likely to be hand-made from feral bushes by a small operation, which is a completely different product from the Georgian tea that a Soviet household drank, and the two share only a place.
What Georgians drink
A description of something people do now, compiled from published accounts rather than from practice.
Imported tea, mostly, in the ordinary way — packeted black tea, bags, and increasingly the same international brands available anywhere. Domestic consumption of Georgian tea is a small fraction of the market, and the domestic reputation of the local product is not straightforwardly positive: for a generation of drinkers it is associated with the low-grade end of the old system rather than with the hand-made revival. That is an obstacle the revival has to work against at home while being received abroad with no such baggage. Tea also sits awkwardly against the Georgian table more generally. This is a wine culture with an elaborate hospitality structure built around the supra and the toast, and tea does not have a comparable ceremonial place; it is a domestic drink and a mountain-region one, taken with sugar or jam. A tea catalogue looking for a Georgian tea ceremony will not find one, and the absence is informative rather than a gap in the research.