Seven months out of the year, I really don’t drink hot beverages of any kind. This time of the year though, a nice steaming mug of comfort is most welcome. I certainly drink my share of coffee but, in general, I prefer tea. Unfortunately, my selection out here in the hinterlands of Plains state America is poor to non-existent. There’s the usual dusty boxes of mass market grocery store brands if I’m lucky.
Do you have any good suggestions for online ordering of quality, loose leaf teas delivered by mail? My go-to us usually English Breakfast tea but I’m OK with dropping a few quid a month on some semi random selection that might be interesting. Services that offer diverse sampler packs to enable me to sample a nice variety would be good. A monthly subscription service with a wide selection of quality samples would be ideal.
All polite suggestions welcomes and I’ll set out the biscuits.
You appear to be based in UK, which probably makes my US-based suggestions not very useful. But here they are anyway (I don’t know if any of them have subscription services like you described).
No, I’m U.S. based. I was just goofing with the quid and biscuits bit for no obvious reason than rampant schmuckery. Maybe It’s PTSD from living in Red State America. I offer sincere apologies to anyone I may have confused or offended.
Glad to hear they will be of some use then. I have dealt with all of them, and their products seem to be genuinely good quality tea, and they have a lot of variety. None of them is cheap, however, if that’s an issue.
There are a ton of other sites, if you google (for example) “loose tea for sale online” or something similar. These are just the ones I have bought from.
Yes, searching on my own was my first step but frankly I was a bit overwhelmed. I was hoping to tap the wellspring of doper knowledge for advice on cutting through the posers and finding the better suppliers.
If you want to get ‘artisan’ about it, this post from Serious Eats (which is usually a great site to browse, anyway) has a list of their favorite, circa 2015, passionate mail-order tea purveyors: Where to Buy Amazing Tea Online
Upton! That’s the one you all talked about before, when we last had this thread. It was on the tip of my brain and I couldn’t remember.
I’ve not ordered from them—I have a bale of Harneys to work through—but they looked very interesting and comparable in price to Harneys. Certainly less expensive than the purveyors sound in that Serious Eats article I linked to.
I’ll have to try Halmari. My favorite Assam tea is no longer available in the U.S. I’ve haunted all the local shops looking for it. I now rely on a friend to bring it to me when returning from her annual family visit.
Right now, I’m working through a bag of Yorkshire Gold, as I ran out of my fancy, Indian estate tea.
I order from Tea Source a lot. They’re based in St. Paul, so maybe not too far away from you. Huge selection of black and green teas, and their tisanes are damn fine.
David’s Teas has some lovely teas, a huge variety of quality teas. They are very expensive and their customer service is nothing short of rip off central. I wasted months trying to get what I ordered, the agents were rude and basically said, “we’re keeping your money. What are you going to do about it?” Save yourself the agony. You won’t get the right order and you also won’t get a refund.
I especially like their gunpowder green, and a Ceylon green whose name I forget. All their teas that I’ve tried have been solid
I buy tea from Rishi
because I returned from South Africa having really enjoyed rooibos, but a lot of what I could buy here didn’t taste very good. I bought every brand I could find at the supermarket, and Rishi’s was the best, to my tastes. Their teas are variable, but some are really excellent. I like their Ancient Golden Yunnan (one of their cheaper Yunnans, but one of their better ones, imo) and their Japanese rice tea. (That’s not the real name, but it’s common in Japan to get tea mixed with toasted rice, and Rishi’s is quite good.) They have some fabulously expensive teas, too, some of which are excellent and some of which don’t taste that different from cheap tea – at least to me. But they always send a sample of something new with my order, and that’s often fun. I think the owners care about tea and want you to care, too.
(We both drink teas from both those sources, fwiw, but we each keep up the stock from the shop we order from.)
Sorry you had this experience. I agree David’s is on the expensive side, but I have never had any experience remotely like this when dealing with them, either in person or online.
Glad your experience has been better. I might have caught them at a moment of expansion and was dealing with poorly trained or supervised employees. It ended up being a wasted $50. Even worse, it was a gift so I needed to find a replacement and get it delivered.
And it sounds like there are quite a few tried and true tea purveyor suggestions here so folks have good choices. Just reading them makes me want to have a good cuppa.
I’m late to the party but I’m another fan of Upton Tea. I’m also a casual follower of Series Eats and I hadn’t seen that article, so thanks! They recommend Simpson & Vail for Nepalese tea and mention Mist Valley. Here is S&V and Upton links:
S&V is noticeably cheaper (prior to shipping) but Upton tells you the flush so I would interpret them as the more “serious” tea purveyor. I spend a lot of money at Upton, mostly on single-estate Darjeeling teas. That said, maybe my all-time favorite tea was Equal Exchange’s loose leaf Darjeeling blend which sadly is no longer sold.