Having grown up drinking tea and living a sober lifestyle as an adult, founding CEO of Sarilla Sara Delaney had a dream of providing non-alcoholic options to Beer City’s brewery and restaurant scene.

Working in fair trade certification in the 2000s, Delaney was communicating with a fair trade coffee farmer who invited her to come visit Rwanda to see what it was like for the farmers so she could properly tell their story. She accepted a job managing a restaurant in the capital of Rwanda in 2009. There, she not only fell in love with the country and its people. She also fell in love with their tea.

“I learned so much about tea in Rwanda,” Delaney said. “The process was so simple there; it’s very accessible. I really fell in love with the silver tea’s flavor and realized its power. It gave me smooth, streamlined energy and helped me to focus. I knew I wanted to bring it back with me.”

Delaney said she is not into fussy tea. As a busy woman, she said she wants her tea to be really simple — grab-and-go style. After looking at the market opportunity around Asheville, she saw that bars and breweries wanted to offer that social comfort of having something to drink for people not drinking alcohol.

“I started playing around with recipes in my kitchen,” Delaney said. “I was doing cold steeps and playing with nitro infusion. I love the fizzy mouth-feel but not the full feeling in my stomach.”

Delaney went to the Craft Beverage Institute in Candler and worked with Director Jeff “Puff” Irvin. She learned to keg, created standard operating procedures, and started testing recipes. She took her kegs of fizzy teas to a coffee festival in the River Arts District and to the grand opening of Ginger’s Revenge in 2018 and got great feedback.

Initially using a Canton brewery’s facilities to keg her teas, Delaney said business was really ramping up in 2020. When Covid first began the brewery shut down, and later flooding washed many of her kegs down the river. 

“I had to move my production north,” Delaney said. “We needed to start canning, and there wasn’t a facility here that could work with our proprietary process that needed specific equipment, and none had the ability to put our product into the slim cans that our brand uses.”

Currently, Sarilla teas are currently canned at a co-packer in Vermont at a rate of about 40,000 cans per quarter. Delaney said as demand grows across the country, she hopes to see that number double or even triple by the fall. She said Sarilla is shipped to many locations in the Southeast, Northeast, and Pacific Northwest. 

“I’d love to bring production back home to WNC,” Delaney said. “I’d also love to have a few manufacturing partners around the country. It’s really important for me to be as environmentally friendly as possible with freight, and we also have to make sure that we stay true to our brand ethics as we scale up.” 

Empowering the farmers and tea pluckers of Rwanda is one of the most important aspects of her brand’s ethics, according to Delaney. She has partnered with 52 Rwandan women at Ubuzima Healing Garden Farm, and is teaching a resilience training program for them. They are also building their own brands of herbals, and she said it’s a true partnership and a much more equitable model for sourcing her ingredients than just paying fair trade premiums, which still wouldn’t be enough to bring farmers out of poverty.

Delaney also partners with nonprofits and organizations here in WNC and in Rwanda to provide assistance to rural communities in Rwanda. Helping to provide everything from water to teaching financial literacy for Rwandan residents, she said she hopes to teach others about the opportunities and endless possibilities entrepreneurship can bring through the growth of her own WNC-born brand of teas.