The Tea House

The Tea House opened in Bogotá in December 1990, built around a specific, uphill goal in a country with a deeply rooted coffee culture: introducing Colombians to tea as a category worth its own attention, not an afterthought next to the coffee counter. The company formally incorporated the following year and has operated continuously from Bogotá since, now selling through its Carrera 14 storefront and nationwide via e-commerce and WhatsApp ordering.

The house sources loose-leaf and bagged tea from what its own materials describe as the best plantations and gardens of the East, carrying black, green, white, yellow, oolong, pu-erh and herbal varieties alongside a curated line of teapots, infusers and other accessories. It positions itself explicitly against the tea retail standard set by markets with a much longer tea tradition — England, Ireland, Germany, France — treating that comparison as the bar to clear rather than an aspiration to gesture at.

More than three decades after opening in a country where drinking tea instead of coffee was itself a small act of counter-programming, The Tea House is one of Bogotá's longest-running specialized tea retailers, still built on the same premise it opened with: that a market this coffee-loyal had room for tea done properly.