Reading a Tea Label and Asking the Right Questions
A seller who can answer specific questions is worth more than any certification on a packet.
Tea packaging ranges from genuinely informative to almost entirely decorative, and the difference correlates well with how much care went into sourcing. Knowing what to look for narrows the field quickly.
The Three Things That Matter
What you actually want to know
- Harvest date. Not a best-before date. When was the leaf picked?
- Specific origin. Region, and ideally the garden, village or producer.
- Cultivar and processing. Which plant variety, and how was it made?
A packet giving all three is telling you the seller knows their supply chain. A packet giving none is telling you the tea was bought as a commodity, which does not make it bad and does mean nobody tracked it.
Harvest Date Versus Best Before
A best-before date two years in the future tells you nothing about freshness. Green tea from last spring and green tea from three springs ago can carry identical best-before dates and be entirely different products.
For green and lightly oxidised teas, harvest date is the single most important piece of information. For aged puerh and roasted oolong it matters differently — you want to know when it was made and how it has been stored since.
| Category | How much freshness matters | Ideal age |
|---|---|---|
| Green tea | Enormously | Current year's harvest |
| White tea, fresh style | Considerably | Within a year, or deliberately aged |
| Light oolong | Considerably | Within 6-12 months |
| Roasted oolong | Less; can improve | Any, with known storage |
| Black tea | Moderately | Within 1-2 years |
| Ripe puerh | Little | Any |
| Raw puerh | Inverted; older is often better | Depends entirely on intent |
Ask a seller when a green tea was picked. If they do not know, they are a shop rather than a tea merchant, and the tea will reflect that.Osric Delaine
Terms Without Meaning
- Premium, finest, superior. No definition, no requirement, no information.
- Hand picked. Almost all speciality tea is; it says nothing distinguishing.
- Rare. Unverifiable and used constantly.
- Imperial or tribute grade. Historical terms used as marketing.
- Wild. Occasionally meaningful, frequently not; ask what it means.
- Ancient tree. Sometimes genuine, widely claimed, largely unverifiable.
Questions Worth Asking
- When was this picked?
- Where exactly does it come from — which region, and which garden or producer?
- What cultivar is it?
- How was it processed, and how heavily was it roasted or oxidised?
- How has it been stored since it arrived?
- How long have you worked with this producer?
A good seller enjoys these questions and answers them at length. A seller who deflects is telling you something useful, and the answers correlate strongly with what ends up in the cup.
Buying Samples
The most efficient way to learn what you like is to buy small quantities of many teas rather than large quantities of few. Most specialist sellers offer samples, and a sampler of six teas costs less than one large packet of something you may not enjoy.
This also protects against the specific disappointment of committing to a hundred grams of something that turns out not to suit you.
Certifications
Organic and fair trade certifications carry real meaning and are expensive to obtain, which means many small producers making excellent tea do not have them. Their absence is not evidence of poor practice, and their presence is not evidence of quality in the cup.
Buy less, more often
Tea deteriorates from the moment it is packed, and a large quantity bought cheaply will be past its best before you finish it. Fifty grams of something excellent, drunk while fresh, gives more pleasure than two hundred grams of the same tea drunk over two years.
Price
Price correlates with quality loosely and with rarity, labour intensity and marketing strongly. Silver needle is expensive because picking only buds is slow, not because it is necessarily better to drink than white peony.
The best value in tea is generally in categories that give many infusions — oolong and puerh — where an apparently expensive packet produces a low cost per cup.