Reviews
Scored on flavour, aroma, value and brew forgiveness — that last one because a tea you can ruin in thirty seconds of inattention is not as good as one you cannot, whatever it tastes like at its best.
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19 reviews
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.
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Air, light, heat and smell are what degrade tea. A set of sealed opaque tins removes three of them for about twelve dollars.
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Every brewing instruction written in teaspoons is wrong, because leaf density varies enormously. A cheap scale fixes all of them permanently.
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Five presets, a hold function and a gooseneck spout at roughly half what the boutique kettles cost. The single best upgrade for most tea drinkers.
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A lightly oxidised rolled oolong that unfurls over eight or more infusions. Per cup of drinkable tea, nothing else here comes close.
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Individually 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.
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The Jin Xuan cultivar tastes naturally of cream and butter. A great deal of what is sold as milk oolong is flavoured to fake it — this one holds up, but check the label on any you buy.
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Heatproof borosilicate with a deep mesh strainer. Practical for a table of people and quietly educational, because you can see exactly what your leaf is doing.
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A blend engineered for consistency, milk tolerance and a very wide brewing window. If you want one tin in the cupboard that never disappoints, this is the unglamorous right answer.
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Bulk dried hibiscus at a fraction of boxed-blend prices — and the subject of the most solid clinical finding in the whole herbal category.
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Apple, hay and honey, and a bedtime ritual worth keeping. Just be clear that the anxiety trial everyone cites used a concentrated extract, not a cup of tea.
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A third of the price of bud-only white tea and, for most palates in a blind cup, more enjoyable. The best-value entry point into the category.
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Naturally caffeine-free, low in tannins, and it will not go astringent however long you forget about it. The most useful tisane to keep in the house.
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Superb pour control, one-degree precision and a build that feels like an appliance rather than a gadget. Also roughly double the price of something that works nearly as well.
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Pan-fired rather than steamed, which makes it nuttier, rounder and considerably more forgiving than a Japanese green. A good first green tea.
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A single-origin Assam with real backbone. Strong enough to be a genuine coffee substitute and astringent enough that you will want to watch the clock.
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A lidded bowl that is the entire equipment list for gongfu brewing. Awkward twice, then trivial forever.
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Steamed, grassy, faintly oceanic and genuinely sweet when you get the temperature right. Also the tea most likely to punish you for using boiling water.
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Downy silver buds and a cup like light honey. Worth having once — but it is bud-only, and buds are where caffeine concentrates.
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