What are your favorite tea shops (international shipping)?
I’m curious whether there are any good tea shops that I might not know about. I have purchased tea from probably multiple tea shops, maybe a total of 10 different ones (many of them on ebay).
I have been a repeat customer to 4 tea shops in particular.
These are my favorites in order:
1. www.jkteashop.com
- Although this shop doesn’t sell as huge of a variety of tea as other shops might, in my experience I have only had good quality tea from this shop. Also sells good puerh and very good Wuyi tea. So far I have yet to drink a Wuyi tea as nice as this shop sells (for the price, at least). Even the cheap teas are good. Never have I had cheap Tie Guan Yin with as good of a quality as this shop sells (talking about the 2A Tie Guan Yin in particular. For some reason some teas suddenly got incredibly cheap, and this tea goes for like $6 per 100g at the moment).
2 (but maybe equal to 1). www.yunnansourcing.com
- Has a great selection of teas. Sells expensive teas as well as more affordable teas. This shop seems to sell tea of good quality for fairly cheap compared to many other shops. Also has very active repeat customers who write a lot of reviews on the teas they purchased, so you can always have a pretty good idea of what it is you’re about to order. To top this off, GREAT customer support. Whenever I had an issue with my order, I was helped properly. When I wanted to order a good puerh tea, I asked for recommendations within my budget and got an elaborate answer to my question with multiple recommendations.
3. www.dragonteahouse.biz
- This shop just have a HUUUUUGE selection of teas, teaware and anything else tea related. This was one of the first shops I stumbled upon early in my tea exploration journey (I shopped from their ebay store back then username: Ldllu. But due to their vast selection of teas you can easily be overwhelmed and confused as to what tea to buy as some teas are sold as so many different qualities. I like this shop a lot, but sometimes buying tea here is a bit of a gamble. Even when the tea is sold as a high quality tea, but the price does not reflect that, it is very likely to be a disappointment and not the bargain you hoped it would be. All this being said, they also sell great tea (otherwise I wouldn’t be a return customer, of course). Their huge selection of teas means there are a lot of good teas, but also quite a few not-so-good teas.
4. www.teavivre.com
- This is probably the very best tea shop for newcomers to Chinese loose leaf tea. The website is very user friendly and the teas they sell are very nice. Although their teas might not be particularly exceptionally extraordinary (not selling many “rare” teas), the tea they do sell is of good quality, and their more popular teas have MANY reviews, so you can get a good idea of what it is you’re getting. That being said, they do sometimes sell VERY good tea. The best Tie Guan Yin I ever had I bought from teavivre (it was an autumn or winter picked tea). I don’t often order from teavivre anymore, but they really are a good tea shop, and were my #1 for a long time.
These are my personal favorite tea shops.
PS, I don’t know whats happening to www.jkteashop.com, but recently many prices have DRAMATICALLY dropped. Shipping cost isn’t inclusive, but still very cheap. I don’t know if they’re going out of business or whats going on. Some teas have more than halved in price it seems. Please tell me if you know why this happened.
I made a pretty big order when I saw this. Like the Da Hong Pao I used to buy there costed maybe $35 per 100g, now its only $15 so I bought 200g for 26 euros. Imperial Yunnan Fengqing Golden Buds is now only like $6 for 100g? (excluding shipping, but still thats maybe only $10 in total). Imperial Zhejiang Yunwu(Clouds Mist) Green Tea less than $3 for 100gram?!? Also Anxi Gande 2A Tie Guan Yin(Iron Goddess of Mercy) $3.11 for 100g (this is the tea I mentioned earlier) Premium Mt. Wudong Mi Lan Xiang (Honey Orchid) Phoenix Dancong $8.60 for 100g? I remember this costing like $20! Imperial Golden Buds Tan Yang 100g for $12.46? But some extremely high quality teas have not changed in price.
These are all teas that I ordered, and more, maybe 2 weeks ago (still waiting for it to arrive).
I hope they’re not going out of business or something :s. Please tell me if you know whats going on with jkteashop. I tried contacting them, but I got no reply (their website isn’t very functional, reviews aren’t added and haven’t received a reply from customer support for a long time whenever I needed to ask something).
So…. I got a bit carried away there…
What are your favorite tea shops :p?
I would add to this list Chawangshop, Berylleb King Tea on EBay, King Tea on Aliexpress (no relation between the two), Awazon at www.pu-erhtea.com, and Royal Puer. These are all shops I have bought from more than once except for Royal Puer. I find them all good with Berylleb King Tea being a superior store. Also there is White2Tea whom is hard to beat. My all time favorite shop as far as international shipping goes you already mentioned, Yunnan Sourcing. None of the stores I mentioned, though all good, are as good as Yunnan Sourcing.
One thing you should know about Dragon Tea House is they have developed a reputation for selling fakes. They sold me one that I questioned them on as to if it was a real Dayi and they did give me a refund. I still sometimes buy from them but try to buy nothing likely to be faked.
Yes, I did notice some odd things as well. For example, the description of all teas switches harvest time to 2016 at the exact same moment around spring. Even teas like Da Hong Pao, which is usually only ready for sale in autumn.
That being said, they do sell good teas. But it is sometimes a bit of a gamble.
Also I forgot to mention, I asked them why some of their teas were low quality when I expected them to be higher quality. They replied saying that they have received a lot of similar complaints from other customers and that they would narrow down their tea selection to basically weed out the lowest of quality tea.
A couple more to check out are Hojo Tea, Essence of Tea, Taiwan Tea Masters, Tea Hong, and BitterLeaf. I recommend them all. So many shops, no offense to any vendors I forgot about. I didn’t re-list vendors if they were mentioned above.
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