STORY BY MICHAEL HARDEN, PHOTOS BY CHRIS TURNER

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or many of us, a major achievement over lockdown would have been re-organizing the pantry. Zoë Davis’ lockdown included having a baby and buying a chai business, which included building a small production facility in the backyard of her house in the Macedon Ranges, then running the whole thing, from production to paperwork, mailing and delivery. Some people are obviously more organised than others.

Chai, for those not already on the bandwagon, is a warm, sweetly aromatic, spiced tea-based drink, often milky and most commonly associated with India. Those who are already chai converts or know someone who is will understand Zoë when she talks about her “passion and desire” for chai. People who love it talk about in terms of “before” and “after”. In fact, the chai that first turned her into a massive fan was made by the business she now owns.

“I first started drinking Anushka Chai at Mister, a café in Macedon,” says Zoë. “Then my older daughter started working at a café in Woodend called Fox in the Chamber which we discovered was owned by the same people behind the chai we loved so much. When my daughter told me that the owners were selling the chai business because the café had become so busy, I saw it as a really cool opportunity to own something we’d fallen in love with years before.”

Anushka Chai was already re-branding itself as Captain Spice when Zoë, whose background is in nursing, decided to buy the business. The owners, looking for someone as chai-passionate as they were to buy Captain Spice, not only gave her six months of mentoring, including teaching her how to produce their signature sticky chai, but also gave her the option of using either name.

“The new name seemed more fitting,” Zoë says. “They were basing the Captain Spice branding around Amelia Earhart, the famous aviator, and my husband is a pilot – a captain in fact - and so the Captain Spice name just worked on a few levels.”

So what is it about Captain Spice that makes it so special?

“For starters, we source spices from India, Sri Lanka and Nepal because they’re a much higher grade, and then, unlike many other chais we don’t use ginger, fresh or powdered, so Captain Spice has a sort of spicy, caramelly flavour that works well without milk but is sensational with, particularly soy milk. We also sweeten our chai with coconut sugar blossom, so it’s vegan, and we use pink peppercorns so that when you’ve brewed it and strain it, it looks very pretty with the pink peppercorns, green cardamom and all the other spices like cinnamon and cassia.”

Captain Spice comes in two versions – the sticky (slightly wet) chai that needs some brewing to prepare and Chai Brew, a ready-brewed concentrate that can be simply steamed with milk for a quick, easy and delicious chai fix.

There are potentially other chai products in the mix too – a seasonal Christmas chai, for example, or a chai-scented beauty scrub – but with a fresh business, new production facilities, a rapidly expanding client base, not to mention the new baby, it seems like Zoë Davis has achieved enough right now.

But maybe not.

“I have big dreams,” she says, laughing. “ I want to be everywhere – a whole chai empire.”

Captain Spice

www.captainspice.com.au

@captsinspicechai