Companies like Washington's own Starbucks have made coffee the beverage of choice for many Americans. However, Revival Tea Company, based in Spokane, aims to make craft tea just as integral to modern beverage culture.
"Tea isn't just an alternative to coffee — it's a category with limitless potential in its own right," says Revival CEO Drew Henry.
It's a vision more than 250 people who recently pledged funds to Revival believe in, too.
In the beginning of January, the company secured $500,000 in a crowdfunding campaign via the platform Wefunder. The company set a goal of raising $1.2 million by April, and plans to use the funds to propel Revival throughout its next stages of growth beyond the Inland Northwest.
Revival Tea Company started out in 2018 as an online company, a foundation that helped it weather the pandemic.
Things would have been much different, however, if Henry and his wife, Cerina, had stuck with their original business plan of opening a whiskey distillery in Spokane. After multiple trips to Ireland for business research, though, the couple decided to pivot. They enjoyed whiskey, but as tea drinkers they saw an untapped market in craft tea.
The Henrys' first brick-and-mortar location in downtown Spokane, at 415 W. Main Ave., just celebrated its five-year anniversary. The speakeasy-style basement tea room, once the site of an early Spokane bar run by the famous liquor tycoon James "Jimmie" Durkin, attracts all sorts of demographics with a shared love of tea.
In early 2023 Revival expanded into the street-level space above the tea room, a spot now dubbed the Phoenix Cafe offering boba, coffee, and cafe fare like toast and acai bowls. Revival also touched down that year in North Idaho with a Coeur d'Alene location that opened at 201 N. First St., also offering food, boba, coffee and tea.
Drew Henry says future locations in other states are also in the works and are planned to resemble Revival's Coeur d'Alene store in menu and design. Some stores he hopes will also have a drive-thru.
Revival will also soon launch a line of canned tea drinks, and Henry says the company has been experimenting with making a powder version of its chai concentrate.
Due to fast-growing demand for its products, Revival outgrew its Spokane-based production and packing facilities last year and started working with tea industry veteran James Mackness. Mackness was added to Revival's board of directors and is the founder of a tea-packing company called Motovotano in Anacortes, Washington.
"We're really lucky that we have someone like him who handles that part of the business, and it allows us to focus more on making bold teas," Drew Henry says.
While Henry says the company will always be rooted in Spokane, Revival is currently expanding into new markets throughout the U.S. Henry recently moved his family to Palm Springs, California, to be closer to some of those targets in Arizona, Nevada and Southern California.
All this considered, the Henrys have come a long way in five years. While they previously enjoyed drinking tea, the couple faced a steep learning curve when they began formulating their own blends for the business.
"We almost didn't do Revival because 30 days in, if I would have invited you over, you would have spit it out. It was the worst cup that's ever been made," Henry says, referring to early iterations of their spiced chai blend.
"Luckily, we figured it out with cup sizes and different types of ginger, and it became what it is today," he continues. "I think it's been a bit of a superpower going into the industry, honestly, like being a bit ignorant and not knowing things because we didn't know any better."
415 W. Main Ave. and 201 N. First St., Coeur d'Alene
Open daily 9 am-6 pm
revivalteacompany.com, 509-903-6937
To most, tea seems as simple as putting a tea bag in hot water. However, Henry explains that many brands sold in the U.S. use dust and fannings, which consists of tea plant stems and large leaves all finely chopped up into dust-like particles.
Craft tea, on the other hand, is about quality and consistency. Revival uses the flowery orange pekoe, the tiny bud on the top of a tea leaf, to increase its products' health benefits. And to ensure consistency, Revival crafts its blends in small batches.
While honoring tea's time-honored traditions, Revival's team also seeks to innovate the industry by creating unique blends and products. One of its most popular blends, the Northwest Breakfast, embodies the Pacific Northwest with its cedar tips that also give a boost of vitamin C.
"Literally, [with] Northwest Breakfast, I had a prominent tea person tell me, 'You can't do that, you can't put pine needles in a breakfast tea.'" Henry says. "And it was like, 'Watch us! We don't know any better.'"
The blend originally used Western white pine tips, but demand for the tea was so high that Revival exhausted domestic supply of the needles, forcing a switch to cedar tips, which have a similar flavor profile and health benefits.
Revival's Willy Wonka-esque tea innovations have been essential in making the beverage more accessible to a new generation of tea connoisseurs, people who are all in different stages of their tea journey, Henry says he realized.
"A lot of times they go from milkshakes to boba, [or] they go from boba to one of our [tea] mocktails," he notes.
Next thing you know, you don't know what hit you, and you're drinking a cup of tea straight. ♦
