About Ian Bersten, inventor

Ian Bersten has been involved in the coffee and tea industry since 1968, when he first opened a coffee-roasting shop and began importing small amounts of packed tea from India and Ceylon. Over the next four decades he accumulated one of the largest private collections of books on coffee and tea in Australia, as well as a large collection of tea and coffee antiques. These led to the writing of the book Coffee Floats, Tea Sinks. Ian used his training as an economist and his knowledge of scientific principle to analyse the art of a good cup of coffee. Throughout this period, tea was a mystery to Ian; the measures of quality offered by the tea industry never seemed to be found in the cup. He had contact with many tea experts, but found more opinion than fact.

On studying tea himself, Ian made a number of discoveries leading to the design of the Tea-Cha. It became quickly apparent that there were certain important factors in tea-brewing: the size of the leaf, the brewing time, the water temperature and the fact that the astringency of black tea was different to the tannin bitterness of black tea and did not arrive in the cup in the first 30 seconds. All of these became important factors in the Tea-Cha filtering process.