The Tea Maven of Scotland & Beyond

“You can’t often change the big stuff in life, but you can have a good cup of tea,” observes Beverly-Claire Wainwright. While most tea drinkers might not know her name, tea growers in Sri Lanka, Scotland, Myanmar, and the United States have valued her expertise for a decade.

Beverly readily admits that she wasn’t particularly interested in tea nor was she an avid tea drinker for most of her life; though, she did have a loose-leaf-tea phase while studying geology at university. After graduation, she opened a ceramics studio. Then came marriage and a baby, which required a change of focus. She had a good camera and decided to use it to do freelance work while her child was little. Eventually, Beverly secured a job managing a photography company. “I was sent in to turn the business around so it could be sold, and I did,” she says. That success led her to work for a Spanish company that specialized in portraiture, opening international markets for them. “It became a very large business,” she says. “And eventually, my husband came to work for me.” But with the stress and strain of managing such a company, came burnout.

“I literally woke up one morning, turned to my husband, Neil, and said, ‘Look, I’ve decided that what we’re going to do is to sell the house. You’re going to go get a job of some sort that doesn’t involve me, and I’m going to sign up for volunteer work,’” she remembers. Within three months, they had done just that, and she found herself in a remote part of Sri Lanka during the island nation’s civil war doing business development for farmers.

Somewhat randomly, one owner of Amba Estate stopped by her workplace unannounced and invited her to visit. “I said, ‘I’ll be there this weekend.’ And literally, I hopped on three buses, went up into the mountains, and fell in love with the place,” Beverly recalls. At that time, tea was being grown and harvested at Amba, but there was no tea factory on the estate nor was any tea being made on-site.