We are a small tea company, based in Birrarung-ga/Naarm (Melbourne, Australia). We specialise strictly in Chinese tea, and almost exclusively in pu-erh tea from Yunnan province. We produce our own collection of teas each year, from material we source in the tea mountains. Despite appearances, you may be shocked to learn that we are not, in fact, a global megacorporation, but a small team of three people who would say 'I work at KUURA', and a handful of other friends and longterm collaborators who'd say 'I work with KUURA'.

KUURA was birthed at the start of 2017 as an unavoidable progression of our personal (read: excessive, expensive, all-consuming) consumption of pu-erh tea. All 'businessess' exist for a reason, usually to create profits. For sure, this business allows us earn a livelihood, but the sole motivation is to find and make teas that we personally want to drink. We long for a day where we can just share and drink tea in free association, and not have to sell it. Unfortunately for now, we must be bastards and try to sell you products, to keep the machine going. Sorry about that.

You can find our ongoing music mix series, as well as our Spotify and Apple Music playlists here.

We specialise in Chinese tea, and almost exclusively in tea from Yunnan province. Our primary focus is pu-erh tea, but we also sell white and black tea. We can only be in one place during each tea season, and it takes a lifetime to develop experience, knowledge, and relationships in order to acquire and create good tea in just one area. Also, Yunnan is a huge place! So we'll be stuck there for quite a while (hopefully forever).

If you are looking to buy a specific kind of Chinese tea (say, oolong tea), we'd first recommend familiarising yourself with exactly what kind — oolong tea is a huge category in itself, made in many different places and styles. If you already know a bit about what kind of tea you want, we'd recommend finding someone who specialises in that particular area or style, rather than a one-stop-shop that sells tea from dozens of different styles from many different provinces (or countries).

Basically, there's no wrong way to brew tea. Think of tea brewing as a continuum. 

We have an in-depth guide on gongfu style brewing, as well as other educational articles housed under our BLOG+ tab, but the simplest way to drink any tea with no specialised equipment is as follows:

1. Boil a kettle of water (100C).

2. Grab a mug, cup, or other suitable vessel.

3. Cover the bottom of the vessel in a thin layer of tea leaves.

4. Fill the vessel with boiled water.

5. Wait until cool enough to drink.

6. Sip and enjoy. Most of the leaves should have sunk to the bottom.

7. When you've drunk down to the last bit of tea with just enough liquid to cover the leaves, fill the vessel up again with boiling water and repeat. You can do this until there's no flavour left. 

In general, if your tea is too bitter, you might need either less tea, or to brew more tea for less time. 

If the tea is way too weak, you are better off adding more tea rather than brewing for longer.

It's easiest to always use boiling (i.e. 100C) water, and play around with how much tea you use and how long you brew it for. If you don't get good results that way, then you can start to use cooler temperature water.

This is a complicated topic; but the short answer is that you'll never find an 'Organic' stamp or certification on any of our products. This requires some explaining.

The best quality tea is produced in a forested, biodiverse growing environment, with no agricultural intervention (i.e. pesticides, fertilisers, or other chemicals). These teas are worth more money and are more sought after by most tea traders and consumers, precisely because of their quality and cleanliness.

Farmers who produce these kinds of teas have no need or reason to spend the (often significant) amounts of money to have their teas certified as 'Organic', since the demand already outpaces supply. Even if they do, it's incredibly unlikely they would pursue a foreign certification, considering their primary focus is domestic customers within China.

However, you can rest assured, that almost all of our teas are going to be either completely clean of any agrochemicals, or incredibly close to completely clean. In the past, we have personally conducted independent testing in line with EU 440 MRL on some teas, and found them to be completely clean.

Running these tests for every tea we sell is financially infeasible for us at this stage, but part of the reason we each year travelling directly to tea forests and mountains in Yunnan is to verify the quality and integrity of the growing environment.

Unfortunately, a common knee-jerk reaction of some people is to assume that because our tea comes from China, it must be covered in every nasty chemical available, or grown in some high-pollution area. This couldn't be further from reality, and for us, comments such as these highlight a clear gap in  knowledge as well as problematic underlying perceptions about China.

Most tea products you find that have an Organic certification or label, are produced by much larger companies, where it serves a marketing purpose. Finally, it's important to note that personally, we don't really want to drink teas that are covered in pesticides, so we don't buy ones that are. Simple.

You may have come across a piece of paper inside or on top of the leaves in your tea cake. Do not fret! It's there on purpose.

In Chinese, it's called a neifei, roughly translating to 'inner ticket', and it's there to prove that the tea material is from the producer on the wrapper, and the tea cake itself hasn't been swapped out and re-wrapped (i.e. counterfeited).  

No one is exactly trying to fake our teas just yet, but it's an extra assurance that it's our own material and has been pressed to our specifications.

Most people remove it at some point, but if some ends up in your tea, it's totally harmless, and will not affect the tea in any way. You can even brew it up; sometimes there's bits of paper that end up in the teapot. It might alter the mouthfeel a slight bit, but it's printed on food-grade paper with soy-based non-toxic inks. 

We store most of our tea that's currently for sale at our warehouse in Melbourne, Australia, in a custom-built specialised storage room that allows us to monitor and control our desired levels of heat and humidity. Pu-erh tea is a long game, and we intend to play it through to the end, so we built a storage solution with that in mind. 

We ship all orders with Australia Post. The total shipping cost of your order is automatically calculated from Australia Post's official postage rates, which vary depending on the size and weight of the package, and the intended destination. This price is displayed at checkout.

We offer free shipping for orders within Australia above $75AUD.

We offer free shipping for orders to New Zealand above $90AUD.

We offer free international shipping anywhere in the world for orders above $150AUD (approximately $100USD).

We occasionally run promotions or sales with free shipping at a lower threshold, which should help make things easier if you're sitting on the fence about ordering. The best place to hear about these promotions is by subscribing to our newsletter.

We also use as many truly home-compostable or biodegradable and recycled packaging materials as possible.

We previously operated a retail store at 104 Errol Street, North Melbourne, from 2018 to early 2020 when COVID-19 restrictions meant we chose not to renew the lease. At the end of 2021, we moved into our current warehouse space down the road at 400 Victoria Street, North Melbourne. We operate our tea storage and dispatch online orders from here, but we are still undertaking renovations and construction to fit-out a retail and tea tasting experience space. You are more than welcome to order online and come by to pick-up your order in-person, but we can't offer in-store shopping or regular tastings just yet, sorry! 

We run a limited number of tea tastings, workshops, and other ticketed events throughout the year — usually in Melbourne, but not always. If you want to ensure that you're first to know of our next event, the best way is to subscribe to our newsletter. The second best way is to follow us on social media (all linked in the footer), and the worst way is to refresh our website religiously.  

If you're keen on drinking and buying our teas in-person, at your own leisure, we highly recommend paying a visit to any of our stockists around the world.

We do. We currently work with a number of cafes, restaurants, bars, independent stores worldwide. We can supply tea, teawares, information and advice.

Get in touch via our Contact Form.

You can find a list of our current stockists here.

Pu-erh tea, also called 'puer' or 'puerh', is a category of tea that comes from Yunnan province, in southwestern China. To be technically called 'pu-erh' it must come from this area, and also be made from large-leafed varietals of Camellia Sinensis Assamica. Think of it as a style, alongside white, green, black etc, with the additional caveat that it has to come from a particular place as well. There are two main kinds of pu-erh tea, raw pu-erh (also called 生普洱茶 shēng pǔ ěr chá), and ripe pu-erh (also called 熟普洱茶 shú pǔ ěr chá). 

Raw pu-erh is similar to a strong green tea, generally with some upfront bitter flavours that transform into a sweet aftertaste. Raw pu-erh can be stored and aged for long periods of time, slowly transforming 'green' flavours into more smooth, dark and 'aged' flavours — think wood, incense, and dark sugar. Bitterness and astringency also tend to smooth out with time. The way in which a pu-erh tea will age depends on its storage conditions; ageing pu-erh is a process of microbial ripening, with temperature and humidity affecting the rate of change and the outcome of ageing.

Ripe pu-erh is made by taking loose raw pu-erh leaves, and fermenting them in a big, wet pile over a period of weeks. The fermentation turns the tea very dark, and also very smooth, removing all bitterness. Ripe pu-erh tends to have earthy, fragrant wood, rich flavours and a very smooth, thick, opaque dark brown texture.

Both kinds of pu-erh tea are most commonly pressed into a cake or brick of tea, rather than kept as loose leaves. This is done because it allows for easier storage, transportation, and identification, and has distinct benefits for the storing and ageing process.  

You can learn all about how pu-erh tea is made in our two-part article on the topic; Part 1 covers the rough processing from picking to dried loose tea, and Part 2 covers the pressing of loose tea into compressed cakes.

We travel in-person directly to China, usually twice a year, for the spring and autumn tea season in Yunnan. Whilst there, we spend several weeks in the tea mountains visiting farmers and producers, inspecting tea forests and gardens, sampling and tasting teas, developing and prototyping our packaging, and purchasing material. The final stage of the season is spent organising most of our teas for pressing, wrapping, and packaging, before they're shipped from Yunnan all the way to our warehouse in Australia. Many people are involved in this process, and it's a lot of work. None of this would be possible without the help and labour of many friends and workers.

We often get asked if our tea is 'direct trade', or if we 'pay the farmers a fair price'. If you are used to thinking in, and applying these terms to other commodities and markets, such as coffee, or tea from commercial plantations, it's understandable why you might ask. Tea in China is not so much a commodity as a luxury good, and it is a free market. There is no central 'auction' system, and therefore no set commodity price or futures trading. The price we pay for a given tea depends on what the producer and the market at large thinks that tea is worth. This price varies drastically depending on factors such as the quality, scarcity, and demand for the tea. 

The most common unit we deal with is an individual or family who owns tea producing land and works it themselves (or with hired labour), selling direct to tea traders in the mountains. We generally do not buy tea from markets, factories, commercial plantations, or companies.

It's also important to note that the 'Western' tea market is a drop in the ocean for most Chinese tea producers. The majority of tea being produced in China is for domestic consumption, with a small amount being made for export. People within China are usually willing to pay more for quality tea than foreign consumers.

So, is our tea 'ethical'? Well, if you consider free-market capitalism as 'ethical', then we suppose so.

All the teas we sell are 'true' teas, meaning they are made from the plant Camellia Sinensis, which contains caffeine.

We are often asked if x or y tea has more or less caffeine. The short answer is all kinds of tea are roughly the same. The caffeine content depends on too many factors from tea to tea, such as how old the plant is, the soil, weather, and processing. It's best to consider all kinds of tea as being functionally the same.

We do not sell any tisanes or herbal teas.

If you are worried about excessive caffeine content, try to limit the amount of tea you brew with.

The most important things to do when storing any tea is:

1. Keep it away from sunlight

2. Avoid exposing your tea to strong smells.

Almost all the teas we sell can actually be stored for a very long time and aged, so do not worry about the tea 'going bad'. Try to avoid large swings in temperature or humidity, and keep the tea somewhere stable.

Please note, most teas we sell don't need to be kept airtight or away from oxygen.

If you are trying to store pu-erh tea longterm for the purpose of ageing, storage conditions are a bit more of a consideration. We have an in-depth guide on storing and ageing pu-erh tea in our BLOG+ tab, but for most people, just follow steps one and two. 

We ship almost everywhere in the world via Australia Post. Some countries may have restrictions on tea importation or postage in general, due to disruptions or regulations. If you can checkout on the site, we can ship there. If you have any issues, contact us directly via our Contact Form.

Within Australia, you can expect normal delivery timeframes to be approximately 2-5 business days.

Overseas customers can generally expect 2-3 weeks during normal circumstances, sometimes much quicker, sometimes longer. Depending on your countries' customs policies and workload, packages can sometimes be held up for a while.

All our packages include tracking and insurance, so if something goes wrong, we can either refund you or send another package.