PS Teas
A warm place to start steeping. Honest reviews of loose leaf and teaware from Amazon, plain-English guides to every type of tea, and health claims that name their sources and admit what they do not know.
No sponsored scores. No “miracle” claims. Just the leaf, the numbers and the sources.
Today's small truth
Bitter green tea is almost never the tea's fault. Your water was too hot.
One plant, six answers
Green, white, oolong, black and pu-erh all come from the same shrub. What separates them is what happens in the hours after picking. Herbal is not tea at all, and we say so.
Picked, heated, stopped. The most studied tea in the world and the easiest one to ruin.
Fully oxidised, forgiving, and the tea most of the world means when it says tea.
Partially oxidised, endlessly variable, and the category with the most to give per gram.
The least processed tea there is — and the one whose reputation most outruns its evidence.
The only tea that is genuinely fermented by microbes, aged like wine, and traded like it too.
Not tea at all, strictly speaking — and the category where health claims get loosest, so we are strictest.
How PS Teas works
Top rated
A wide fine-mesh basket that lets leaf expand properly and lifts straight out when time is up. It fixes the two most common brewing failures at once.
Read the reviewAir, light, heat and smell are what degrade tea. A set of sealed opaque tins removes three of them for about twelve dollars.
Read the reviewEvery brewing instruction written in teaspoons is wrong, because leaf density varies enormously. A cheap scale fixes all of them permanently.
Read the reviewFive presets, a hold function and a gooseneck spout at roughly half what the boutique kettles cost. The single best upgrade for most tea drinkers.
Read the reviewA lightly oxidised rolled oolong that unfurls over eight or more infusions. Per cup of drinkable tea, nothing else here comes close.
Read the reviewIndividually wrapped 5 g nests of ripe pu-erh. One nest is one session, which means you can discover the category without committing to a 357 g cake.
Read the reviewGuides
Three numbers decide whether your tea is good. Here they are for every type, plus the two mistakes that account for most bad cups.
7 min read
Forgiving, widely available, and hard to brew badly. If you are buying loose leaf for the first time, start in this list.
6 min read
A variable-temperature kettle is the single upgrade that improves every tea you own. Here is what to look for and what to skip.
6 min read
Everything you need to brew loose leaf properly, nothing you do not, and a shopping list that adds up to less than a hundred dollars.
5 min read
How much caffeine is really in your cup, why the numbers you see online disagree, and the decaffeination myth that will not die.
6 min read
More leaf, less water, very short steeps, many times. It is not a ritual, it is a ratio — and it makes good tea taste twice as good.
6 min read
PS Teas is named for the thing you add at the end of a letter because you could not quite leave it unsaid. The Steep Letter is that: one tea worth your time, the numbers that make it work, and what we got wrong first.
Laugh. Love. Tea.