My Story

Tea has always been my way back to the present

• How it began

My love story with tea actually started through photography. I've always loved tea and aromatic drinks, what we call "aromáticas" back home in Colombia, and coffee was never really my thing. Then one day, loose leaf tea showed up at my photography studio. I had been hired to photograph a small tea company, poster style, and to do it well I felt I needed to understand what tea really was.

So I started researching. I read books, studied the philosophy behind it, the ritual, the meditation, the culture. I fell completely in love. And somewhere in that process, I started dreaming about building a tea business of my own.

That dream took me to Las Vegas every year for four years, to the World Tea Expo, where I trained in tea blending and tea tasting and eventually completed my Tea Teacher Training. Becoming a certified Tea Sommelier wasn't a weekend course for me, it was years of going back to learn more.

• Nine years, one cup at a time

I chose farmers markets on purpose. I wanted to know my customers by name, talk with them, share everything I was learning. For nine years, across Illinois and Florida, my booth became a place people came back to.

I would invite someone to try a tea, place the loose leaf blend in their hands so they could see it and smell it while I told them what was inside, and then offer them the iced tea to taste. That first "wow" never got old.

• The Fantastic Four

I called my original four blends the "Fantastic Four": The Passion One (aka Colombian Passion) for Passion, Hibiscus In Love for Love, Energy Pu-erh for Energy, and Mermaid's Touch for Magic.

• Community

Those years gave me more than customers. They gave me two of my closest friendships. A woman I met at my booth invited me to my first yoga class, and yoga became part of my life. I watched a little girl grow from her mother's belly to seven years old, one market at a time. There were hugs, festivals, a lot of iced tea, and more than a few people who jokingly called me the queen of tea.

• The year everything changed

My ninth and final year at the markets was also the year I was diagnosed with cancer, going through a divorce, and rebuilding my life all at once. Tea had already been part of me for years by then, but that year it became something else: a ritual of slowing down, staying present, and taking care of myself.

To this day, every morning starts the same way. I smell the leaves of my organic Yunnan Pu-erh, heat the water, clean my teapot, pour the water over the leaves, and keep the pot warm over a small candle while I work. I drink several small cups through the morning. It makes me happy. It gives me energy. It brings me back into the day that's actually in front of me.

• A new chapter in North Carolina

When I left the markets, I believed I was taking Bettina's Tea into its next chapter. I had developed Hibiscus In Love as a ready-to-drink tea, and a family connection to a canning facility brought that dream, and me, to North Carolina.

Hibiscus In Love made it into cans, but life had other plans. I was in the middle of an incredibly hard season, and I never gave that launch the push it deserved. Still, I arrived in North Carolina full of hope for what Bettina's Tea could become.

• What Bettina's Tea means today

I named the brand Bettina's Tea because I wanted it to feel personal. I'm a photographer and a maker at heart. I love creating with my hands, and from the beginning I wanted every blend I made and packaged to carry something artistic, handmade, and unmistakably mine.

Even the names came from feeling, not marketing. Hibiscus In Love was our longtime favorite, and customers loved asking for "a little Love." Sweet Dreams got its name from its passion fruit aroma. Life In Balance came from its Ayurvedic roots. Some names were born on the spot, tasting tea with the women who worked alongside me.

Along the way, I also became a certified Health Coach, because I wanted to serve my community better and help tea become a real part of people's everyday lives, not just something they drink once in a while. Today my dream for Bettina's Tea has grown past selling tea. I want to build tea meditation experiences, teach mindfulness, and create community, especially with women navigating life transitions, entrepreneurship, loneliness, or the search for wellbeing. These aren't abstract topics for me. They're roads I've walked myself. In five years, I picture a physical space where people can slow down, drink tea, make friends, and learn together: tea, books, conversation, and wellbeing, all under one roof.

Wellness, to me, isn't about being perfect. It's being able to live in the present with hope for the day ahead, instead of staying stuck in the past or worried about a future that hasn't happened yet.

My hope is that Bettina's Tea becomes more than a drink for you, too. That preparing a cup becomes a small reminder to pause, return to yourself, and savor the present, one cup, one moment, one day at a time.