Meet SPILL Tea
- Jessica Simms-Baalham
- Jul 18
- 3 min read
30 years ago, if someone had said people would come to a pub and drink tea, you wouldn’t have believed them.
How times change.
That said, serving tea that tastes as good as the one you make at home is still a challenge. Knowing who grew that tea? Even harder. And finding out what they were paid? Almost impossible.
So, we’re proud to say we’ve done the impossible - by serving SPILL tea in our pubs with rooms and Big House hotels.
Let us tell you more.
What’s SPILL?
It’s a new everyday tea. Better quality. Better Tasting. And pays farmers more. At least 50% more than Fairtrade prices.
The tea supply chain is usually murky. The everyday tea we drink is often bought from multiple countries through auctions or brokers. This complex web makes it almost impossible to know what smallholder farmers are actually paid.
SPILL sources directly from farmers, putting more cash in their pockets.
What does it taste like?
Bold, not “meh”. Golden, not grey. Thick, not thin. Full-bodied, not wishy-washy. It totally hits the spot.
That’s down to the leaf. Tea farmers in Rwanda follow a formal plucking standard: the freshest two leaves and a bud from the top of the plant. Leaves are hand-picked and checked for quality. Farmers earn a premium for plucking tea to this high standard. And they pluck by hand – they do a better job than machines.
Where’s it from?
Rwanda — one of the world’s best-kept secrets when it comes to tea.
Sun, rain showers, and hills: the perfect mix for growing rich, flavourful tea. And Rwanda has lots of all three.
Who grew it?
You might picture tea coming from huge estates. And much of it does.But 70% of the world’s tea is grown by smallholder farmers - subsistence growers with their own small tea gardens.
SPILL sources exclusively from these small-scale farmers - like Gianpierre and Cartas:
Gianpierre started growing tea in 2018, fresh out of school, on just 0.04 hectares (about 4% of a football pitch). Now, they’ve grown their garden to the size of four pitches.
When we asked how they drink their tea, they looked sheepish. “We don’t drink tea,” they said. “But your tea is so good!” we replied. “We only like it sweet - and sugar is expensive.” So they drink banana juice instead. We told them we drink our tea without sugar. They think we’re mad.
Meet the Founders
We’re Lou and Sofia. We launched SPILL in July 2024. We've been in tea for a long time - we started teapigs back in 2006, and before that, Lou was a tea taster at Tetley.
Tea has changed a lot since then - we drink all sorts now (green, white, herbal, rooibos). But one thing hasn’t changed: the tea we drink every day. It goes by many names – “builder’s brew”, “English breakfast”, “normal tea”.
We realised we’d been neglecting the tea we drink most often, and the farmers who grow it who too often, live in poverty.
So we said: “Let’s start again.”
Let’s find better tea. Let’s source it direct. And pay farmers more.
The tea in Rugabano, Rwanda - and the people behind it - blew us away.
And that’s how SPILL was born.
How many cups of tea do you drink?
Lou: 10. Yes, 10. Sofia: 2–3. Pretty average.
Why “SPILL”?
It took a while - and a lot of name lists.
We wanted something short, memorable, and meaningful.
Then one day, our accountant, Sharon said,“What about SPILL? People say ‘spill the tea’ now. And that’s what you’re doing—telling the truth about tea.”
That was it.
So if you ever need a great brand name, ask the accountant.
Comments