In terms of iced-tea-like drinks, I like jamaica (hibiscus flower “tea”). So refreshing.
I love tea, have it every morning. I usually drink Twinings English Breakfast. Two of my favorites are Bewleys Irish Breakfast tea and Republic of Tea Blackberry Sage.
Had afternoon tea last week at a local shop and tried Pomegranate Rosehip Tea. Adding it to my favorite list!
For iced tea I really like Luzianne. It makes a very smooth iced tea.
I tried Tazo Wild Sweet Orange this morning. I didn’t much care for it.
I will drink any ice tea that is put in front of me :). Here in the south you can get sweet tea, which is actually too sweet for me, so you can ask for half and half-half unsweet, half sweet. Perfect.
For iced tea, I love teas with a citrus element. You can also use a basic flavor like English Breakfast or Darjeeling and mix it with lemonade. Yum!
OH BOY. I’m so glad I came across this thread. I love tea, and like MOD I have a tea shelf. I have tea boxes that don’t let in light, since that ruins tea. I spend $100 at time on tea. I don’t drink many flavored teas, because good tea is so incredibly delicious. I buy only loose leaf tea, which I steep the black tea in a coffee press that has NEVER touched coffee. My oolongs I steep in a yixing pot.
One of my favorites is Bai Hao, or Oriental Beauty. It is expensive, but you can resteep the leaves (as you do with oolongs). I buy it at Floating Leaves Tea in the Ballard neighborhood of Seattle, WA. The lovely woman who owns the shop travels herself to Taiwan every year to buy her teas, and is the only one in the shop. Very small, fantastic shop.
All the oolongs are of such quality that you don’t need to rinse the leaves as you do most oolongs. I have a mix of exquisite oolongs from this shop. I go in and let her pick my teas for me.
Another tea house I found on our college tours in Claremont, Ca - the Bamboo Tea House - where I order my black teas. I especially love the Halmari Estate Assam, Yorkshire Gold tea, the Vietnamese tea, and the Kenyan tea.
The only flavored teas I own are classic flavors: Jasmine Phoenix dragon pearls (green) and Genmaicha or brown rice tea which has a popcorn flavor.
@Hanna here we call that an Arnold Palmer :).
Ruby. The Claremont shop has really nice prices. :). Next time we are near The shop I need to check it out. Thank you
I’m drinking the Tazo decaf lotus blossom green for the first time (thanks, Muhlenberg College!). Highly recommended.
I checked my cupboard this morning to see what I have: Dilmah, Taylor’s, Twinings, Greenfield, Mighty Leaf, and some European Liptons. Yes, Lipton here is the Motel 6 kind of tea, but in Europe it actually tastes good.
I am just back from a trip home to Scotland. Tea is one of the main items we bring bag. Tetleys , Twinnings Early Gray and lady grey. My neighbor message me to bring PG Tips decaf tea bags.
The scottish tea is so much better than tea in the US. I think the taste improvement has a lot to do with the Scottish water.
People who know me are too frightened to ask me this question. I sort of fell down a rabbit hole of tea connoisseurship 7-8 years ago, and I suppose it’s my significant hobby now. I just came back from a couple of weeks in China, a good portion of which was spent in tea markets, tea plantations, and tea factories in Yunnan and Anhui provinces, and tea shops in Hong Kong. Like @Ruby789 and @LVKris , I only buy bulk tea, and I don’t always buy it cheap.
You can get really good tea online at reasonable prices. Some of my favorite shops, and what I think they are good for:
@LVKris mentioned Red Blossom Tea in San Francisco. They are a little pricey, but their quality justifies it, especially for oolongs, which are really their specialty. (I think they have good Chinese green teas, too, but I don’t particularly like the most popular Chinese greens.) I have spent more money at Red Blossom than anywhere else, and happily. Their Tung Ting and Tieguanyin (Iron Goddess of Mercy, and original source of the word “tea”) are great examples of basic, light mountain oolongs – the Platonic ideal of what you get in Chinese restaurants with unnecessary jasmine flavoring added. The former is Taiwanese, the latter from eastern mainland China. I also love their Wenshan Baozhong (Pouchong), which is like green tea with a kick, and Da Hong Pao (Big Red Robe), a dark, roasty version of oolong from the Wuyi region. Red Blossom also has some good Chinese blacks (which are “red tea” – hongcha – if you are speaking Chinese). I really like their Taiwanese Three Cultivar Red and their Yunnanese Gold Thread. They carry authentic Lapsang Souchong (low grade leaves that are roasted over pine logs and acquire a smokey pine tar scent) which is almost undrinkable straight, but makes superb iced tea in the summer.
Teamasters is one Frenchman in Taiwan who sells four or five versions of every type of Taiwanese oolong. All very high quality. It takes a long time for shipments to arrive. The tea aficionados I know who are most knowledgeable will not buy oolong from anyone else (but I will).
I love Bellocq Tea Atelier in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Their web site is gorgeous, and the owners are lovely people with excellent taste. I generally don’t drink blends and flavored teas, but the Bellocq people do such a good job that they are the exception to my rule. I love their Gypsy Caravan (mainly smokey Qimun with rose petals) and National Parks (black tea with juniper, spruce, and other woodsy elements). They have excellent Nepalese teas that would be Darjeelings if you moved the bushes a few hundred meters west, and that cost about 70% of what they would cost if you did that. Japanese greens, too (although, like me, they just begin to scratch the surface of Japanese greens). What they also do is purchase great, unique teas and tisanes that they can’t necessarily keep in stock, and sell them until they are gone. (Getting consistent supply is a horrible problem for good tea shops, and has cause Red Blossom to cut back significantly on what it offers.) I have wonderful tea flower tea and mulberry leaf tea that I got from them this way.
Camelia Sinensis is a small chain of tea houses in Montreal that also sells tea online. I love the tea houses themselves, but ironically the camelia sinensis tea I have bought from them is underwhelming. But their Quebec-sourced herbal tissanes are outstanding.
The Pu-erh Shop is an amazing website based in Troy, Michigan of all places, with hundreds and hundreds of SKUs of very reasonably priced pu-erh teas of varying quality (but never bad quality for the money, at least in my experience). Pu-erh is the most popular type of tea in southern and western China; it’s more or less fermented black or green tea. Something of an acquired taste.
Other good sites from which I have yet to purchase anything are Yunnan Sourcing, Seven Cups Fine Teas in Tucson, and VitaliTea in Seattle.
What’s the shelf life for tea?
Tea Gschwender is great too. They’re in Chicago (probably elsewhere, too, but that’s the one I know about).