What this site is for
Two audiences, held at once. People who already love tea and want to know whether a particular Da Hong Pao is worth the money. And people on cup one, who have been told their whole lives that tea is a bag of dust in boiling water and have no idea where to start.
Writing for both means never using a word without explaining it and never dumbing anything down. It is a harder brief than picking one, and it is the right one — the beginner becomes the enthusiast, usually faster than anyone expects.
How scoring works
Every review carries four scores out of ten, and an overall that is a published weighted average rather than a feeling.
- Flavour — 40% of the overall. What it actually tastes like, brewed to its own best parameters.
- Aroma — 20%. Dry leaf and wet leaf both.
- Value — 20%. Cost per drinkable cup, which means re-steeps count. This is why a good oolong often beats a cheap black.
- Brew forgiveness — 20%. How wide the margin for error is. A tea you can ruin in thirty seconds of inattention is genuinely worse than one you cannot, whatever it tastes like at its peak.
Teaware is scored on value and reliability only, 50% each, because a kettle has no aroma.
How reviews are researched — plainly
This matters more than the scoring, so here it is without decoration. PS Teas reviews are research-based syntheses, not independent laboratory testing. Each one is built from the manufacturer's own specifications, published tasting notes and cultivar information, the established brewing parameters for that style of tea, and the weight of aggregated buyer feedback. Product data comes from Amazon listings. Drafts are assembled with automated tooling and a human reads and approves every review before it is published — nothing reaches this site unread.
We do not claim a blind tasting panel, a controlled environment or instrument measurements, because we do not have them. Where a review describes how a tea behaves when over-steeped or brewed too hot, that reflects the known behaviour of that style of leaf rather than a documented experiment on that specific tin.
How health claims are handled
There are 18 sources in the citation registry, and no health claim appears anywhere on this site unless it points at one of them. Each claim carries a strength tag — systematic review, guideline, randomised trial, observational, emerging, or traditional use — and the language is hedged to match. “Reviews of the evidence suggest” is not the same sentence as “early and limited research hints that,” and we do not let the second borrow the authority of the first.
Where the evidence is thin, we say so on the page rather than quietly leaving it out. The white tea hub says most claims made for white tea are borrowed from green-tea research. The green tea hub says the Cochrane review on cancer prevention was not supportive. Those are the two paragraphs a tea affiliate site has the most commercial reason to omit, which is exactly why they are there.
None of it is medical advice. See the health disclaimer.
How PS Teas makes money
Amazon affiliate commission, and nothing else. No sponsored reviews, no paid placements, no brand gets to see a score before it publishes. The scoring happens first and the affiliate link is attached afterwards — which is a process claim, so judge it by whether we ever say a thing is not worth buying. We do; see the reviews.
Full terms on the affiliate disclosure page.
Corrections
If something here is wrong — a brewing parameter, a historical claim, a citation that does not say what we claim it says — we want to know and we will fix it and say that we did. Reach us through the newsletter reply address.