This is one in a series about possible futures, which will be published in Booch News over the coming weeks. Episode 5 appeared last week. New episodes drop every Friday.

Introduction

In the mid-21st century, rising seas and extreme weather rendered traditional agriculture impossible, but kombucha cultures thrived in controlled environments. Vertical fermentation towers became humanity’s primary food production method, with kombucha serving as a crucial source of nutrition. Climate refugees built resilient communities around shared SCOBY cultures that could withstand disasters. A critical challenge for kombucha production was tea availability, which became increasingly problematic on a planet where climate had reached a tipping point. Fortunately, tea plantations—like French vineyards that migrated across the Channel to England due to global warming—proved adaptable. This episode describes the expansion of tea plantations housed in vertical agricultural towers in the United Kingdom. These symbiotic systems proved more resilient to warmer temperatures than traditional agriculture.

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The Great Tea Migration: From Tropics to Temperate Towers

By 2045, the traditional tea-growing regions of Darjeeling, Ceylon, and Fujian had become uninhabitable wastelands. Rising temperatures, erratic monsoons, and soil degradation forced humanity to reimagine where and how tea gardens could survive. The solution emerged from an unlikely source: the pioneering tea estates of Britain’s Celtic fringe, whose temperature-tolerant Camellia sinensis varieties became the foundation for humanity’s vertical fermentation revolution.

The Cornwall Prophecy: Tregothnan’s Vision Realized

Dr. Sarah Boscawen-Chen—a scion of the estate family and daughter of fermentation pioneer Dr. Lila Chen—pioneered the integration of tea cultivation with kombucha production. Her breakthrough insight was that, rather than importing tea leaves from distant plantations at great carbon cost, enclosed vertical towers could simultaneously grow tea and brew kombucha, creating closed-loop ecosystems in which plant and microbial systems symbiotically enhanced each other.

What began in 2005 as Jonathon Jones‘s ambitious experiment at the Tregothnan Tea Estate in Cornwall—England’s first commercial tea estate—evolved into the template for post-climate agriculture. The estate’s sheltered valleys, with acidic soil and a mild climate moderated by the sea, made Tregothnan ideal for tea cultivation. Located eight miles inland from the coast, the tea garden was shielded from corrosive salt air. The plantation initially seemed a botanical curiosity, producing boutique teas for local markets. But as global warming devastated traditional growing regions, Tregothnan’s hardy cultivars proved prophetic.

By 2055, Tregothnan’s original 20-acre plantation had expanded into a 150-story vertical tea forest, its crystalline towers rising from Cornwall’s coast like botanical cathedrals. The estate’s heirloom varieties—originally adapted to British weather patterns—thrived in controlled environments that precisely mimicked their ancestral growing conditions while protecting them from the climate chaos outside. They extended the original Cornish innovation of the iconic biomes at the nearby Eden Project.

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No One’s Cup of Tea

The BBC documentary No One’s Cup of Tea, broadcast in 2045, revealed the scale of disaster in the world’s major tea-growing regions. While Britons were left “gasping for a cuppa” as prices skyrocketed, growers in India and elsewhere lost their livelihoods. The Chinese government, flush with its successful invasion of Taiwan, barred BBC camera crews from plantations; there were no such restrictions in India.

The moving documentary footage remains unforgettable:

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Sabnam Tamang stands among dying tea plants, the soil cracked and lifeless beneath her feet. The temperature reads 41°C—impossible for Camellia sinensis to survive. Around her, workers harvest what they know will be the estate’s final crop.

Mardin approaches her mother, carrying a withered tea leaf. “Mama, the irrigation system failed again. The aquifer is empty.”

Sabnam takes the leaf, crumbling it between her fingers. “This estate has produced tea for over 200 years. Our ancestors planted these original bushes stolen from China by the British. And now…”

She doesn’t finish. She doesn’t need to.

Dr. Boscawen-Chen, flown over by the BBC as an advisor, examines the soil with portable equipment, recording data. “Mrs. Tamang, I’m sorry. I know what this means to your family.”

“Do you?” Sabnam’s voice carries an edge. “Your Cornwall estate thrives while ours dies. British tea survives because you got lucky with latitude and ocean currents. We weren’t lucky.”

Sarah meets her anger with compassion. “You’re right. Geography saved us. But that’s why I’m here—to offer alternatives.”

She pulls up holographic displays showing the vertical towers rising along Britain’s coast. “Tregothnan has developed controlled-environment cultivation. We can replicate Darjeeling’s original growing conditions—temperature, humidity, soil chemistry—inside climate-controlled towers. Your tea varieties can survive. Your expertise is needed.”

Sabnam laughs bitterly. “You want us to grow Indian tea in England? In artificial environments? That’s not tea cultivation—that’s botanical imprisonment.”

“It’s adaptation,” Sarah corrects gently. “The choice isn’t between traditional estates and towers. It’s between towers and extinction. Traditional agriculture is over. The question is whether we preserve what we can.”

Mardin interrupts, pointing toward the horizon where dust storms approach. “Mama, the evacuation trucks are here. We need to decide.”

Sabnam looks between her dying estate and Sarah’s holographic towers. “If we come to Cornwall, can we bring our cultivars? Our specific Darjeeling varieties?”

“That’s exactly what we need,” Sarah confirms. “Genetic diversity. Traditional knowledge. The towers work, but they need expertise from growers like you to thrive.”

“We’ll come,” Sabnam decides. “But understand—we’re refugees, not employees. We’re abandoning our heritage because climate catastrophe gives us no choice.”

“I know,” Sarah acknowledges. “The Thames Valley Mega-Tower has apartments for climate refugees. Your family will have housing, education, and work. It’s not home, but it’s survival.”

As the Tamangs board evacuation trucks with their precious seed stock, Sabnam takes one last look at the estate her family built over generations.

“Remember this, Mardin. Remember what the world looked like before we had to farm in towers.”

Scotland’s Tea Renaissance: From Whisky to SCOBY

The Tea Gardens of Scotland collective, which began in the 2020s as artisan experiments in Perthshire, Fife, Angus, and Kincardineshire, became the backbone of northern Europe’s kombucha security. These scattered walled gardens and sheltered slopes, initially dismissed as romantic Caledonian anachronisms, proved ideal testing grounds for extreme-weather tea cultivation.

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The collective’s leader, Dr. Morag MacLeod (formerly of the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh), transformed traditional Scottish agricultural practices into cutting-edge biotechnology. Her team developed “Highland Hardy” tea varieties that could survive extreme temperatures while maintaining optimal tannin profiles for kombucha fermentation. These robust cultivars became the genetic foundation for vertical tea forests across Arctic regions, replacing traditional farming zones.

By 2050, Aberdeen hosted the world’s tallest tea-kombucha tower: a 1,200-meter spire that produced enough fermented beverages to supply all of northern Europ