Buying Tea Online
How to judge tea online
It is possible to buy some very good tea on the internet, that at least at present, you can’t find in retail stores. So before we give our guidelines to tasting and smelling tea, here are some things you can be aware of when buying ‘blind’:
- It is hard to tell by sight since the photos you see online. Tea is hard to photograph because tea is best viewed in the sunlight because there is a wide spectrum of colors that tend to be on the red and green sides. Digital photography tends to slant to one or the other side, so getting an accurate reproduction of what the eye sees is hard, and Photoshop tends to make the problem worse not better. Some photos you see online for the most part are carefully contrived. We try to do our best to get a true representation of our tea. We have spent a lot of time experimenting with lighting and camera setting to create for the camera what we see with our eye in the sunlight. We are always trying to improve our techniques.
- Tea is subject to a great deal of misinformation, mislabeling, and price variations that are inconsistent with any kind of standards. Deception has always been prevalent in the tea business, so ‘buyer beware’ is always a good motto for everyone. It is often the case that the retailer is selling tea in good faith, but has been misled somewhere along the chain, and the tea is not really what the retailer, and therefore the consumer, thinks it is. Case in point, the English.
- It is true that you can spend a lot for tea that is not as good as you think it is, but you can never buy really excellent tea cheap. The Chinese have known the value of good tea for thousands of years, and every leaf of the best tea is sold every year. The British turned tea into a commodity, but good tea, like good wine, is not.
- It’s a good idea to buy from companies that can answer your questions about the tea convincingly. Even though a lot of companies say they buy directly from producers, but there are in reality very few. In China almost all exporting is handled through an export company. The Chinese require that all exports must be handled through a company with an export license. Very few producers have those licenses., and the ones that do are normally confined to exporting their local tea, so they don’t have a very good variety. Even if a merchant does actually visit a producer, buying tea from that producer doesn’t mean that they will be able to export that tea.
- Because of the international nature of the internet, there are some businesses within China that sell tea online. They are able to circumvent the export laws by sending via personal mail. By doing that however, they also circumvent the inspection for contaminates that all tea leaving China must be inspected for, as well as avoiding FDA approval on entry into the country.
- Ask some friends, and there are sites like StumbleUpon.com where browsers rate sites they visit. Make sure you can get your money back if you are not satisfied.
Good luck! The risk is worth it.
We hope this will give you some way to evaluate the teas you buy online.
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