Before there was a pharmacy on every corner there was a bush in the backyard. On St. Kitts, tea has never meant the imported leaf. It means bush tea, the colloquial name for anything brewed from whole leaves picked and dried near the house, and it goes back to the sugar years, when it was the drink of the people who could not buy anything else. Soursop leaf for a bad night's sleep or an unsettled stomach. Lemongrass, basil, mint, whatever grew by the step. The knowledge passed down the way recipes do, by being made in front of you until you could make it yourself.
Jermine Mike grew up with it. Mother Becky was his great-grandmother, a known figure at the northern end of the island, from the generation that drank bush tea every day of their lives. When he started the company in 2015 he gave it her name. He and his partner Sara Ramirez grow the herbs on a plot in Pogson Village, organic, no pesticides, hand-harvested and hand-packed. Mint, basil, lemongrass, soursop. The way he puts it: before prescription medicine, the great-grandparents cultivated bush in the backyard.
The soursop tea is the one to start with. Pure leaf, dried at low heat, packed into unbleached cotton bags, no flavouring and no blend. Steep it five minutes in water just off the boil and drink it black, or with honey before bed. The tannin is soft. The taste is green and faintly bitter, and it is the taste a great many Kittitians associate with being looked after.
The remarkable part is where the tea has gone. Mother Becky now bottles its brews as Quenchers, cold and lightly sweetened with cane sugar, and in March 2026 the line entered Nigeria through the federation's Ministry of Small Business and Entrepreneurship. Three thousand bottles were served at an Afri-Caribbean investment summit in Abuja, the largest single order the company has ever taken. A drink that began as the medicine of the poorest people on a sugar island was poured, two centuries later, for a room of investors on the other side of the Atlantic.
This is the whole shape of the thing in one bottle. A piece of knowledge that would have died with one generation, kept alive because somebody put a great-grandmother's name on it and grew her herbs on purpose. The bush is still in the backyard. The backyard is just larger now.
Shop this story: Mother Becky Bush Tea, soursop · Quenchers soursop · sorrel and mint · turmeric and ginger