Transit Tea Manish Shah puts a new spin on a traditional drink BY ANNIKA TOMLIN Manish Shah, owner of Maya Tea Café, unexpectedly missed his flight and drove 12 hours to his destination five and a half years ago. Along that drive, he came up with the concept for Transit Tea. “He was just kind of feeling burned out, in general, in the tea business,” says Transit Tea brand manager Kristin Brakke. “He doesn’t miss flights. He doesn’t miss anything like that. He had this kind of ‘idea download’ while he was driving, and that’s where Transit Tea, the inspiration for it, was born.” For two years, Transit Tea was a traveling school bus serving hot and iced tea. “What we did on the truck is not at all what we do in the store, just because the truck doesn’t have the capability,” Brakke says. “We are working on kind of retrofitting the truck to make it a mini Transit, if you will.” After years of testing and modifications for the specific ingredients, the brickand-mortar version opened February 3. “What we’ve created now has actually taken us five years to do,” Brakke says. “There is a lot of science behind what we do, but what we created is a way to take tea. … Our tea base is kind of a shapeshifter. “Ours is different. We can make it hot.
We can make it iced. We can make it sparkling. We can also make it into a snow cone.” It took five years to develop because they wanted “the very best of everything,” according to Brakke. “If you look at our syrups, they are not all the same brand,” Brakke says. “We’re, like, OK, strawberry syrup, great. Well let’s bring in all of the strawberry syrups and taste them all and let’s see what happens — and that’s what we did.” From syrups to a specific ice machine that created pellet-sized ice and “the best water in Tucson,” the Transit team carefully chose the top-tier ingredients for the products it wanted to sell. “We spent a lot of time finding the best of the best,” Brakke says. “You can make
Transit Tea
After five and a half years of taste testing, the brainchild of Maya Tea Café owner Manish Shah was born — Transit Tea. (Photos by Dustin Sinclair)
iced tea at home, but we wanted to create something that you can’t really do at home.” Transit Tea offers an array of tea-based sodas, lattes and snow cones, along with plain and chai tea. “I love Solstice; that’s one of my recipes,” Brakke says about the green teabased drink with lychee, grapefruit and elderflower. “The Solstice is probably my favorite overall, but there are a bunch of other ones that kind of stand out because we use really unexpected flavors.” For example, the Kaleidoscope tastes like a watermelon Jolly Rancher, while the Zephyr was inspired by key lime pie. The Rainforest is Brakke’s version of an adult Hawaiian Punch. Fans of bananas foster will like the Luminous. “Each drink has its own kind of inspiration.”
2645 E. Speedway Boulevard, Tucson 433-2886, transittea.com
www.LovinLife.com
Transit Tea offers a variety of tea-based sodas and snow cones, along with regular teas that come in unexpected flavors.
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