What do you look for when buying tea from a website or store? Is it the quality of the tea, price, the details provided about that tea, etc.
Tea is a complicated, wordy and sometimes bitter beverage. What would be a great starter tea? smooth, tasty and easy to pronounce?
Let me know.
Eric .
If you're just beginning I would suggest that you find a local store that sells tea. I live in a fair sized city in the US, but every tea place here I know of is orientated towards selling coffee as well, so look at some coffee shops too. A good owner/employee can tell you about thier teas, thier pronunciation, taste, etc. English Breakfast is a basic tea blend which is relatively smooth and certainly easy to pronounce. Assam is an easy word to pronounce too, it's the part of india where good black tea is produced, just ask for something from Assam, and drink it with milk. Hope this helps -Dave
You might want to look into the website specialteas.com. I've ordered lots of tea from them, all of which has been quite good. There, you can choose from relatively inexpensive teas until you get more familiar with what you are doing and then you can move forward and choose some of their most expensive teas, or other vendors' more expensive teas.
The thing that I like about Special Teas is that they have a fairly large selection from many different countries and areas, and for a "beginner", they have teas that aren't particularly expensive, but are still good and will allow a beginner to get a feel for the different countries, different regions, different styles of tea without spending way too much money or getting ripped off.
While it's certainly not the end-all be-all of a tea vendor, Special Teas is very, very good, especially if you want to familiarize yourself with a broad variety of teas from all over the world without spending tons of money.
I am not an aficionado, but . . .
I would identify reputable web sites by looking over past postings in this newsgroup. I use TeaSpring, Adagio and Upton. Find a good sampler (I got started on Adagio's samplers). Taste, decide what you like, don't like, try some more . . . My "great" tea may not be all that "great" to you. A lot is personal pref.
LB
I'd look for the kind of tea that I like, and I'd look for a place that has a good reputation.
There are places out there that sell expensive teas that aren't really what they claim they are.
I'd suggest trying Upton's and getting some of their samplers. You get a pretty good variety of teas to try out.
I found out about Upton's because I like Panyong Congou and could never find it in the US. Someone pointed me in their direction. They are honest, they have a wide range of different kinds of teas, and their prices are reasonable. They have teas in any price range.
I am personally very partial to Chinese black teas, which I drink without milk. So I'd suggest the Upton's sampler of Chinese teas. But the Darjeeling sampler is also excellent.
And they will also sell samples of anything in the catalogue for a couple bucks.
--scott
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