Transit Tea

from Lovin' Life After 50 - Tucson - June 2021

Hitting the Stage Once Again

Manish Shah puts a new spin on a traditional drink

BY ANNIKA TOMLIN

Manish Shah, owner of Maya Tea Café, unexpectedly missed his ight and drove 12 hours to his destination ve 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 ights. 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 retro tting the truck to make it a mini Transit, if you will.”

After years of testing and modi cations for the speci c ingredients, the brickand-mortar version opened February 3.

“What we’ve created now has actually taken us ve 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 di erent. 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 ve 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 speci c 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 nding the best of the best,” Brakke says. “You can make iced tea at home, but we wanted to create something that you can’t really do at home.”

Transit Tea o ers 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 elder ower.

“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 avors.”

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.”

After ve and a half years of taste testing, the brainchild of Maya Tea Café owner Manish Shah was born — Transit Tea. (Photos by Dustin Sinclair)

Transit Tea o ers a variety of tea-based sodas and snow cones, along with regular teas that come in unexpected avors.