Revival On Offer
Revival On Offer:
Connection, Community, and Excellent Tea For All
BY CARA STRICKLAND
I first met Drew Henry in the winter of 2019, just over a year after he and his wife, Cerina, had launched a kickstarter for their fledgling company, Revival Tea, to spectacular success. We met at Madeline’s to chat about the excitement around their startup and to peek at the construction happening downstairs in the old speakeasy space that would soon be Revival’s first tasting room, which opened in February of 2020.
By the time the issue was back from the printers, it was spring of 2020 and the world had changed. Lockdown had businesses scrambling and after a glorious grand opening, Drew and Cerina were waiting to see what would happen, just as we all were.
The tasting room doubled as a production space, and Drew spent countless hours there coming up with new blends. The extra time and space allowed the couple to begin producing all of their teas in sachets along with loose leaf. They focused their energy on wholesale and grocery accounts, and continued to improve their online presence. The speakeasy space, soon allowed to open for grab and go, remained ready for when it was wise to linger over a cup of tea once again.
Catching up with Drew so many years later, it may seem that a lot has changed. Revival has gone from a bustling online business (with their famous chai leading the charge) to a brand sold all over the country and the world, bringing an artisanal touch to the tea aisle.
Their flagship tasting room now serves as a meeting place, serving tea mocktails and flights and encouraging lots of questions about tea in a welcoming, unfussy environment. In January of 2023, they took over the Sweet Peaks Ice Cream space upstairs and opened a boba shop, which was recently rebranded to the Phoenix Cafe. In June of 2023, Revival added a location in Coeur d’Alene, which blends the tasting room and boba bar experiences together into a satisfying whole. They are also in the midst of raising capital through WeFunder with the goal of opening a series of franchises and one more flagship shop over the next decade or so.
Behind the scenes, Drew and Cerina have gone from being the only two employees, blending batches one at a time and selling at the Thursday Perry Street Market, to having the opportunity to hire a passionate staff and partner with incredible professionals to take some of the pressure of manufacturing and logistics off their plate. Instead of cupping 50 teas to find the right base, as Drew did in the beginning, he can call and describe what he’s looking for and choose from five teas instead.
A lot has changed, of course, but the mission behind Revival hasn’t. They are still passionate about making excellent tea with the best ingredients they can find. They are proud to use only the highest quality flowery orange pekoe from the camellia sinensis plant, which can be processed into black, green, or white tea, as well as maintaining high standards for flavors, herbs and other tea components.
Drew continues to be a tea nerd, happily walking me through the process of creating a detox tea customers will soon be able to sip for themself. They started by researching nearly every detox tea they could find — about 50 — then put every single ingredient into a spreadsheet. From there, they tried to determine which of these would be feasible and sustainable to use. At that point, they obtained and tried all of those ingredients separately to get a sense of what might go together. When the Henrys were almost dialed in, they started to test out how cutting the ingredients smaller or larger impacted the taste — for example, they tasted five different gingers, then tested the favorites with various cut sizes until they found just the right flavor.
Cut sizes are the latest in Revival’s attempts to make everything about the tea-making process consistent and precise. To fill their sachets (which are now a pyramid shape to allow for the best steeping experience) they use a machine with technology borrowed from the trail mix industry. The machine ensures that exactly the same amount of tea components are in each tea bag — down to three pieces of ginger, cut to the perfect size.
“We’re always trying to get better,” Drew says. “Before this, I had never worked in tea, I only drank a lot of it. We meet these incredible tea importers and farmers and I always approach things like a learner. I’m so grateful that people have allowed us to grow and figure things out.”
In the beginning, the Henrys said they’d never do brick and mortar because they only wanted to focus on online and wholesale. They said they’d never do boba, or coffee, or serve food. But something changed along the way.
“At a certain point your company becomes your customers,” Drew says.
They were the ones at the early Farmer’s Markets asking for a permanent place to taste and gather around tea. They asked for boba (and made the drinks containing it bestsellers). They asked for coffee so that they could get their tea-shy friends in the door (and maybe convince them to try a sip), and they wanted food so that they could settle in and stay a while.
“Through all these years and all this change, we’ve learned that’s what makes us special — we create this community space where people can leave the outside world at the door, they can spend hours with a friend, they can study, they can have first dates,” Drew says. “That, to me, is the most exciting part about what we’re building. We are creating these spaces throughout the country that are backed with incredible tea.”
The space is important, of course, but the tea is what holds everything together.
“One of the things we’re best at as a company is inviting people into the world of tea,” Drew says. “Tea can be such an intimidating thing. Some companies try to make it like wine, but we’ve always tried to peel that back. We’ve learned that we are very good at converting coffee drinkers to tea. I think that more and more something we’ll be good at is bringing people to the beginning of their tea journey.”
“When we met, we were just starting this exciting adventure into brick and mortar,” Drew says to me, thinking back to our first winter meeting. “Now we’re hoping to be the Starbucks of tea.”
This doesn’t mean that he wants to run an empire of billions of shops worldwide.
“To some people, Starbucks is a dirty word, but when it first came onto the scene there was nothing like it. They really became a third place. I went there for first dates, to study and for job interviews. As humans we strive for that connection and I think Covid has brought that out even more.”
“I do believe in our lifetime we will see a tea shop on every corner. We may look back 30 years from now and be like, ‘Wow, remember when Revival was the only one, other than a few local tea houses?’ I think, 30 years from now, in Spokane alone, you’re going to see multiple versions of what we do, just like we’ve seen with breweries. I love that. There’s more than enough room to go around.”