How do I tea?

[rhiannonstone]

Tea friends:

I am spending way too much on delivery boba and Thai iced tea, and have decided that it's silly to not learn how to make them myself the same way I did with coldbrew and espresso drinks. So I want to buy a couple good black teas (Assam? Probably? I think?) to start experimenting with.

Just like with coffee, I don't believe that drinking it iced or with other flavorings means you should use the crappy stuff, so I want the good stuff. Affordably so, especially until I learn how to not ruin it and confirm what I like, but still the pretty good stuff.

But I am like a little baby in tea land, where there are many, many different options for purchasing tea and I don't know how to assess whether the names I recognize are the ones actually worth trying, or whether $25 for 2 oz. is in fact a reasonable price.

Where should I start?

Please consider this a solicitation for any and all tea-related advice you'd like to share.

Comments

[rhiannonstone]

Thank you! You were definitely one of the tea friends I thought of first. :)

In coffee-land, beans with added flavor is a reliable indicator of low quality. I have the vague impression from listening to tea friends over the years that this is probably not the case for tea. Is that impression correct?

And what on earth makes the difference between a $3/oz. tea and a $12/oz. tea?

[ivy]

There are a couple different ways of adding flavors to tea. If you do it by putting other dried things in with the leaves, that's not as looked down upon as spraying some kind of concoction onto the leaves, which, yeah, generally gets done onto lower quality teas. So, like, my favorite anti-drama tea is a black Ceylon with vanilla, cornflower, and blueberry bits in there. I can only think of one flavored tea I like that uses the spray-on method, which is an Ontario Icewine. (It's not white tea and grape bits, it's white tea and spray extract. But it's still good. I like it like I like marshmallow peeps.)

A fair bit of tea is finding out what you like, and how that stacks up against what other people like. There is an axis along which I have refined tastes (I usually prefer plain tea to tea with flavorings), and an axis along which my tastes can be viewed as either refined or barbaric (I prefer single-note flavors, so I like White Peony and Assam and Darjeeling and most Japanese green teas, and I do not like oolongs or pu-erh or any of the more complex teas which are the basis of a lot of Chinese tea culture). There, fancy vs. lowbrow is all a matter of whether your tastes align with what's made for gourmets. Any lover of Chinese tea, I'm a hopeless taste lout in comparison, don't waste the good stuff on me. Pricy Japanese teas, I sometimes can appreciate the differences.

So, I'd start with the more affordable ones unless something in particular is calling to you. If you'd like, I can send you some samples from what's in my cabinet, and you can see what you like and use that to walk yourself in without having to buy 9408390243 different possibly spendy kinds.

[rhiannonstone]

I would love that, thank you! What's the best way to send you my address?

I bought my first experiment at the farmers market yesterday. A local company called Yerba Buena Tea Co. Not that I actually understand what "local" means when it comes to tea companies, since I don't think they grow or even age/ferment/oxidize/whatever the tea--I guess they do the blending? I'll share my results!