Find the only thing in this cup with a straight edge. It's the pale one, tan-brown and squared off at the corners, sitting there among all that curl and twist like it came from somewhere else entirely — because everything else here has the shape its plant gave it, and this one has corners. Somebody cut it. What it is, is bark. What Europe was told for two thousand years is that enormous birds gathered it from a land nobody could reach and built their nests with it on cliff faces, and that the way to get it down was to butcher an ox and wait.

Today's cup: Melbourne Breakfast — Camellia sinensis, cinnamon, vanilla. 

1 tsp, 200mL, 100°C, two minutes straight or three-plus with milk.

A tea and a musing every weekday morning.

Before It Begins is made by Impala & Peacock Artisan Teas, blended by hand in Melbourne. This week's cup is waiting for you at online. 

To join our tea ritual - click here .

Black tea doesn't wait. Amber to copper to a deep red-brown, and inside two minutes you can't see the bottom of the cup. Three things are steeping in there, and they make up about the most comforting combination in the range: tea, cinnamon, vanilla. Breakfast, essentially. Except that not one of the three was ever meant to be pleasant. Each of them exists because a plant needed to keep something out — and the parts we prize most turn out to be the parts that were working hardest at it.

Today's cup: Melbourne Breakfast — Camellia sinensis, cinnamon, vanilla. 1 tsp, 200mL, 100°C, two minutes straight or three-plus with milk.

A tea and a musing every weekday morning.

Before It Begins is made by Impala & Peacock Artisan Teas, blended by hand in Melbourne. This week's cup is waiting for you at online. 

To join our tea ritual - click here .

Look for the smallest thing in the cup. Barely bigger than a peppercorn, dark, easy to lose among the larger fruit — the sort of thing you'd walk straight past in a hedge. Which is exactly where it grows, in the scrubby edges of things, on the strip of ground nobody has a use for. For centuries this was the medicine everybody had — not the best one going, just the one that was free, and everywhere, and belonged to nobody. Which is presumably why it came with a rule. 

Today's cup: Berry Antioxidant — raspberries, juniper berries, elderberries, hibiscus, calendula petals. 1 tsp, 200mL, 100°C, three minutes or more.

A tea and a musing every weekday morning.

Before It Begins is made by Impala & Peacock Artisan Teas, blended by hand in Melbourne. This week's cup is waiting for you at online. 

To join our tea ritual - click here .

Among the dark curls and the near-black berries there are pale pieces, much lighter than everything around them, almost pastel by comparison. Pick one up. It has kept its whole shape — you can still see the little clustered surface — and given up all of its water. It weighs almost nothing. That weightlessness is the reason this tea tastes of anything at all, and the reason involves a decision every tea blender makes quietly, between a shortcut nobody would ever catch and a slower way that costs considerably more.

Today's cup: Berry Antioxidant — raspberries, juniper berries, strawberries, elderberries, hibiscus, calendula petals. 1 tsp, 200mL, 100°C, three minutes or more.

A tea and a musing every weekday morning.

Before It Begins is made by Impala & Peacock Artisan Teas, blended by hand in Melbourne. This week's cup is waiting for you at online. 

To join our tea ritual - click here .

Almost everything in this cup is some version of red. Dark curls, near-black berries, pale pink fruit, even the petals are a warm orange. And then there's one thing that isn't — small, round, hard, matte blue-grey, with a dusty bloom on the skin like a grape. It sits in all that red looking like it wandered in from somewhere else. It also isn't a berry, despite the name, and what it actually is turns on a decision its tree made a very long time ago: hold on tightly, or become worth carrying.

Today's cup: Berry Antioxidant — raspberries, juniper berries, strawberries, elderberries, hibiscus, calendula petals. 1 tsp, 200mL, 100°C, three minutes or more.

A tea and a musing every weekday morning.

Before It Begins is made by Impala & Peacock Artisan Teas, blended by hand in Melbourne. This week's cup is waiting for you at online. 

To join our tea ritual - click here .

Look for the darkest thing in the cup — deep magenta, curled at the edges, slightly leathery, so saturated next to the pale raspberry that it looks almost synthetic. Nearly every bit of red in this morning's tea is coming from that one ingredient, and it isn't the flower. The flower is enormous and papery, opens for a day, and drops. What's in your cup is the part that was holding it closed beforehand, and was still standing after it fell.

Today's cup: Berry Antioxidant — raspberries, juniper berries, strawberries, elderberries, hibiscus, calendula petals. 1 tsp, 200mL, 100°C, three minutes or more.

A tea and a musing every weekday morning.

Before It Begins is made by Impala & Peacock Artisan Teas, blended by hand in Melbourne. This week's cup is waiting for you at online. 

To join our tea ritual - click here .

Watch this tea go from pale pink to a ruby that holds the light like stained glass. Somewhere in that colour, an antioxidant is giving a small piece of itself away so that whatever's beside it doesn't have to. Less a nutrient than a gesture, and it's happening in your cup right now. You will not feel a thing. Nobody has ever set down a cup of tea and thought, well, there go my polyphenols. The not-noticing turns out to be the point.

Today's cup: Berry Antioxidant — raspberries, juniper berries, elderberries, hibiscus, calendula petals. 1 tsp, 200mL, 100°C, three minutes or more.

A tea and a musing every weekday morning.

Before It Begins is made by Impala & Peacock Artisan Teas, blended by hand in Melbourne. This week's cup is waiting for you at online. 

To join our tea ritual - click here .

When this cup is finished, don't throw the leaves away. There's a second cup still in them, and it won't be the same as this one — quieter, warmer, the sharpness gone and something rounder underneath. Easy to call that the lesser cup. Harder to explain why nobody says the same about the quiet movement of a piece of music. Or about the back half of an afternoon.

Today's cup: Lemon Myrtle & Ginger — lemongrass, lemon myrtle, ginger, calendula petals. 1 tsp, 200mL, 100°C, four minutes. It takes a second infusion.

A tea and a musing every weekday morning.

Before It Begins is made by Impala & Peacock Artisan Teas, blended by hand in Melbourne. This week's cup is waiting for you at online. 

To join our tea ritual - click here .

The least impressive thing in this cup looks like garden waste. Pale, fibrous, faded, sitting next to the deep green leaf and the bright orange petals — and doing an enormous amount of the work. In most of the cooking cultures that use it, it's the ingredient that goes in and then comes out: bruised, dropped in the pot, left to give up its flavour, and fished out before anyone sits down. Nobody serves it. Its entire job is to have been there.

Today's cup: Lemon Myrtle & Ginger — lemongrass, lemon myrtle, ginger, calendula petals. 1 tsp, 200mL, 100°C, four minutes. It takes a second infusion.

A tea and a musing every weekday morning.

Before It Begins is made by Impala & Peacock Artisan Teas, blended by hand in Melbourne. This week's cup is waiting for you at online. 

To join our tea ritual - click here .

There is ginger in this cup, and no ginger plant has ever been found growing wild. Anywhere. It doesn't propagate from seed in any reliable way — it spreads from pieces of root, which means every ginger on earth is a division of an earlier plant, handed on. The one in your cup is a continuous living fragment of something people started tending before writing existed. It has no home to return to. It exists because it was carried.

Today's cup: Lemon Myrtle & Ginger — lemongrass, lemon myrtle, ginger, calendula petals. 1 tsp, 200mL, 100°C, four minutes. It takes a second infusion.

A tea and a musing every weekday morning.

Before It Begins is made by Impala & Peacock Artisan Teas, blended by hand in Melbourne. This week's cup is waiting for you at online. 

To join our tea ritual - click here .