Shows / Before It Begins
Before It Begins
Five minutes with a cup of tea, every weekday morning. Pour the water, watch the colour arrive, and hear one true thing about what's in the cup — why lemon myrtle carries more lemon than a lemon does, why hibiscus isn't a flower, why no ginger plant has ever been found growing wild. Then one thought worth carrying into the day. A new blend each week, Monday to Friday. Made by Impala & Peacock Artisan Teas, blended by hand in Melbourne. Best taken with something steeping.
Episodes
- Before It Begins
Reserve - All For One Comes First
All for One is a reserve blend that brings together seven plants from places that would never have met: a European meadow, a tropical beach, a riverbank, a…
- Before It Begins
Reserve - Packed For A Journey
This tea settles pale and cool, silk-soft, with a few white flakes that refuse to sink. As the water draws out colour from leaf and flower, something stays…
- Before It Begins
Reserve - The Cheeseboard Becomes an Orchard
There is mint at the front of this cup, then the soft apple of chamomile, but something else is holding its own beneath the surface. Musky, earthy, a little…
- Before It Begins
Reserve - An Apple Growing On The Ground
The cup arrives gold and clear, a late afternoon light caught in water. In the swirl of petals and darkening leaves, the smallest flower heads hold their…
- Before It Begins
Reserve - The Crowd Behind the Single Bloom
This reserve tea opens pale gold and deepens towards honey, with small domed flower heads, narrow petals, dark green leaves, pale grass stalks, and pieces of…
Before It BeginsGenmaicha Green - The Leaves Aren’t Finished
Genmaicha is a cup of green tea and toasted rice, pale yellow in the light, with leaves that open more with every pour. The first infusion is bold and quick…
Before It BeginsGenmaicha Green - A Forest Asked to Sit Down
The cup of Genmaicha arrives pale yellow, edged with green, the grains drifting as the leaves slowly open and flatten. Watch long enough and the leaves begin…
Before It BeginsGenmaicha Green - Black Tea Isn’t Green Tea Gone Wrong
Genmaicha is a cup that begins with colour—pale, yellow-green, clear enough to see the bottom. The grains catch the eye, toasted gold, a few burst open, but…
Before It BeginsGenmaicha Green - Water Can’t Make This Flavour
There are toasted grains of rice in this genmaicha, a few burst open and white, and the warmth they carry is something the water in your cup can’t make. Not at…
Before It BeginsGenmaicha Green - The People’s Tea
The cup is Genmaicha, a blend where the colour is barely there, pale yellow with a hint of green, and the only things in the cup are narrow leaves and grains…
Before It BeginsRelaxation Tea - Poor Man's Saffron
The cup is warm and clear, copper deepening to red, with small things suspended in the light—needles, petals, grains, and a single bright strip of gold. The…
Before It BeginsRelaxation Tea - The Armour Everyone Loves
The cup opens in copper and red, warm and clear, with gold at the edges where the light gets in. Most of what floats belongs to the same family of colour—rust…
Before It BeginsRelaxation Tea - Whoever Gets There First
Relaxation Tea opens as a warm copper red, clear enough to see the bottom of the cup. Before you even look, something arrives first: a scent rising with the…
Before It BeginsRelaxation Tea - The Red Is The Bruise
The cup is red before anything else, a clear, coppery colour that deepens as you wait. Most of what you see comes from the fine, rust-coloured needles at the…
Before It BeginsRelaxation Tea - Everything the Flower Will Ever Be
Relaxation Tea is a cup that gathers both what has opened and what is still folded. In the water, rose petals drift alongside tight rose buds, rooibos needles…
Before It BeginsLapsang Souchong - A Mountain That Became a Word
Lapsang Souchong is a cup that deepens in colour almost as soon as the water hits the leaves — amber, copper, then a dark red-brown. The leaves themselves are…
Before It BeginsLapsang Souchong: What the Rest of the World Asked for
The cup of Lapsang Souchong gathers colour fast—amber, copper, then a deep red-brown that almost blacks out the centre. The smoke rises before anything else…
Before It BeginsLapsang Souchong - Leaves Four and Five
The cup is Lapsang Souchong, and the leaves in it are larger than you might expect — long, broad, dark, with the roughness of something that’s weathered more…
Before It BeginsLapsang Souchong - Easy to Spoil
The cup darkens from amber to deep red-brown, and the first thing you notice is smoke—broad, warm, unmistakably from a tree, not just a fire. Stay with it, and…
Before It BeginsLapsang Souchong - The Fire Nobody Chose
The cup is dark and smoky, the colour rising fast from the leaves—amber, then mahogany, then the brown of an old violin. The aroma is wood smoke, not from a…
- Before It Begins
Reserve Tea - The Root Heard It Wrong
At the bottom of the teapot, something heavier waits. Everything else in this blend is light—leaf, stalk, bud—rising towards the surface, but one piece has…
- Before It Begins
Reserve Tea - What Stayed When the Petals Fell
The tea opens green-gold and clouded, with every leaf and stalk sinking to the bottom—except for the small, violet-grey grains that float, turning slowly on…
- Before It Begins
Reserve Tea - A Grass That Smelled of Violets
Everything in today's cup has a colour — except for the pale, straw-yellow pieces that look as if they were dry before they were ever dried. They sit in the…
- Before It Begins
Reserve Tea - The Nerve Doesn't Know the Difference
In this tea there's one dark green, serrated leaf, crumpled as if it never quite unfolded. It’s the most ordinary thing in the cup, but it’s the one doing most…
- Before It Begins
Reserve Tea - The Last Thing to Arrive
The Reserve Tea opens with a cup that glows green-gold, shifting in the light like a leaf held to a window. Four shapes loosen in the pot—leaf, stalk, flower…
Before It BeginsEarl Grey - Mr Grey's Legacy
The cup is Earl Grey, and the colour comes up fast—amber, copper, then it stops. There are dark leaves, pale curls of rind, a drift of blue petals, and a scent…
Before It BeginsEarl Grey - The Smell Nobody Names
The cup of Earl Grey Tea is a room-filling presence, its colour rising fast and its scent arriving before the water has finished pouring. There are dark…
Before It BeginsEarl Grey - The Blue Sits Between
The cup opens quickly, the colour shifting from amber to copper and stopping just short of red-brown. In the swirl, dark leaves soften and pale curls of rind…
Before It BeginsEarl Grey - The Only Part That Lingers
The cup of Earl Grey changes quickly, the colour rising and settling into amber and copper before you can look away. In the swirl, nearly everything softens…
Before It BeginsEarl Grey - The Fruit Nobody Eats
The cup is Earl Grey, and the colour rises quickly, then stops just before it turns brown, holding at a glowing amber-copper. In the leaves, something blue…
Before It BeginsPeacock Chai - The Newest Arrival by Centuries
A cup of Peacock Chai is a study in layers: bark, buds, roots, pods, seeds, and a single dark leaf, all steeping together. Every spice in the pot has centuries…
Before It BeginsPeacock Chai - Three Separate Aisles in a Supermarket
The cup in your hands turns dark almost before you notice, copper then deep red-brown, hiding the smallest thing inside. Among the bark and buds, one pale…
Before It BeginsPeacock Chai - The Bud Never Opens
Peacock Chai opens in the cup with a colour that deepens almost before you can watch it, from amber to copper to a red-brown that closes off the light…
Before It BeginsPeacock Chai - Pick One Too Early and It Never Develops
The cup is Peacock Chai, and in the swirl of colour and steam, there's one thing in the blend that stays sealed, a pale pod holding everything inside. The rest…
Before It BeginsPeacock Chai - The Variation Is the Recipe
The cup is Peacock Chai, and the colour arrives before you can name it—amber, copper, then a red-brown you can't see through. In the swirl, dark twisted leaves…
Before It BeginsJasmine Pearls - Three Cups From the Same Leaf
Pour a second cup from this morning's tea leaves and something has already changed. Jasmine's scent is carried by compounds that are highly volatile, which…
Before It BeginsJasmine Pearls - Still Wearing Its Down
Look closely at the tea leaf opening in this cup and one piece hasn't quite joined the others — paler, with a faint silvery coat that looks almost like down on…
Before It BeginsJasmine Pearls - The Smell With No Ingredient
Look through everything sitting in this cup and there isn't a single petal. No flower, no bud, nothing white — just leaf, rolled and opening. And yet the smell…
Before It BeginsJasmine Pearls - Made to Come Undone
Somebody rolled this tea by hand, one at a time, into a ball tight enough to hold its scent for months. Watch it in the water this morning and there's usually…
Before It BeginsJasmine Pearls - The Flower Never Gets to Keep the Scent
There's a cup of jasmine tea in front of you, and none of the jasmine is in it. Each evening for five nights running, fresh flowers were scattered over the dry…