I am Sarah de Witt, and I'm a professional tea sommelier

I didn’t have a defining “I love tea and I’m gonna make a career from it” moment, but there was a turning point when I was studying psychology and found that tea de-stressed me. I started with herbal tisanes before transitioning to the hardcore teas.

I decided to take a break.

I’ve always been entrepreneurial and, being on a student wage with not much to lose, I thought, “Why don’t I just start a business?” I’d been reading about tea and found that the least likely demographic to enjoy it ran from 20-35.

The perception was that tea was for older people, which I thought was nonsense.

There was also a gap in the market: Melbourne’s food, coffee and wine scenes were huge, but tea wasn’t being done justice.

In 2014, I opened my first tea business, Impala & Peacock. I fell so in love with it that I never went back to study.

I’ll never forget my first customer: he ordered a chai with soy milk and honey on the side, and was genuinely excited about the product, rather than the hundreds who’d walked in and gone, “Oh, you don’t do coffee”, and marched straight out again.

I studied and became an accredited tea sommelier with the Australian Tea Masters Association. It was a year-long course covering the fundamentals, science and art of tea with a lot of flavour profiling and testing – every week we’d get a bunch of different teas to analyse and brew. I also run a loose-leaf tea company, as well as Mary Eats Cake.

There’s a really creative element to blending tea, and inspiration comes from the weirdest places. I remember washing my hands with an Aesop soap that had rose, cardamom and elderberries through it, and thought I should work on that for a tea blend.

Running a business means wearing a lot of different hats. The only constant is that I drink a lot of tea: I always start off with black tea in the morning, then I go to white, then green around lunch, moving towards herbal blends in the afternoon so I can sleep at night.

I try not to judge how other people make tea, but there are little things that scratch at me. For instance, milk should always go first. It disturbs me when people put it in last.

As told to Meg Crawford