Tea 101
Tea Buying Guide
How to buy quality tea: reading labels, choosing vendors, understanding grades and pricing. A beginner's guide to building a rewarding tea collection.
Introduction
The tea market ranges from mass-produced commodity product to artisan-crafted luxury, with confusing labeling practices at every level. Knowing what to look for — and what to ignore — helps you find excellent tea at fair prices.
Reading Labels
Origin specificity: Better teas provide specific provenance. "Darjeeling First Flush, Jungpana Estate, DJ-1" tells you far more than "Indian Black Tea." Harvest date: Fresh tea matters, especially for green teas. Look for a harvest year or season. Grade: {{glossary:tea-grading}} terms like FTGFOP or competition-grade indicate quality level within a category.
Choosing Vendors
Reputable specialty vendors source directly from producers, provide detailed origin information, and often include brewing instructions specific to each tea. Look for: tasting notes that reference specific flavors rather than marketing fluff; harvest dates; and clear provenance. Many excellent vendors offer sample sizes (10-25g) that let you explore before committing.
Understanding Pricing
Tea prices span three orders of magnitude, from $2/kg for commodity CTC to $2,000/kg for competition-winning Darjeeling or pre-Qingming Longjing. The steepest quality gains occur at the lower end of the spectrum: moving from commodity to mid-range ($30-80/kg) typically delivers dramatic improvement. Above $150/kg, you enter diminishing-returns territory where subtlety and rarity drive price more than raw quality.
Building a Collection
Start with one representative tea from each major category: a Chinese green (Longjing or Bi Luo Chun), a Japanese green (sencha), a Taiwanese oolong (Dong Ding or Ali Shan), a Darjeeling (second flush), an Assam or Kenyan black, and a young sheng pu-erh. This foundation provides contrast and helps you discover which styles resonate with your palate.
Red Flags
Avoid vendors who: provide no origin information beyond country, sell only flavored or blended teas, have no harvest dates, or price all teas identically regardless of type. These patterns suggest a focus on marketing over tea quality.