The workshop, the bench, the people.
The Vegan Teahouse is a small vegan tea house in Brunswick, Melbourne. Three of us run it. Twelve products at a time. Workshop hours four days a week.
The Vegan Teahouse started in a Coburg kitchen in 2019. The original idea was to make a half-dozen single-herb tisanes for two cafes that wanted something better than the brown-cardboard supermarket teabag. The half-dozen turned into nine, the nine turned into a wholesale list, the wholesale list turned into a commercial workshop in Brunswick by mid-2021.
We are vegan because we are. Nothing we make or sell contains animal product, and none of our suppliers use animal-derived processing aids. The bigger choice underneath is whole-leaf, whole-flower botany rather than tincture and capsule. Tea is honest about itself. If we have brewed a bad batch you will know on the first sip.
What we make
Two blended tisanes (Camille and Alice, our originals from 2019), nine single-herb teas, and one small range of dried culinary botanicals. The blend list rotates every six to nine months. The single herbs are the spine of the shelf and rotate only when a grower changes.
How we work
We grow some of our own herbs in a small plot behind the workshop, mostly the cut-and-come-again leafy ones. The rest come from a network of twelve small growers across Victoria, southern New South Wales, and one in northern Queensland. Everything is dried in our own workshop dehydrator at temperatures below 35 degrees so the volatile oils stay in the flower rather than the warehouse.
What we do not do
We do not make tinctures. We do not make capsules. We do not make claims about treating, curing, or managing any health condition. The teas we sell are teas. If you are looking for a therapeutic herbalist, ask us and we will point you at three good ones in Melbourne we trust.
The name
The name is plain on purpose. We are vegan, and we sell tea, so The Vegan Teahouse is exactly what it says. We hesitated over the word teahouse, because we are really a workshop with a counter rather than a room you sit and drink in. In the end the plain name won. It tells you what is in the tin before you ask, and that honesty is the whole point of how we work.