Quality Standards for Loose Leaf Tea

lets just hope tea doesn’t become hip to the point we see people drinking it with a spoon and grading its quality on their ipads at starbucks.

in my view law of diminishing returns applies here, if u go from tea bag dust that costs < 5c a cup to a decent loose tea that costs 10-30c a cup
you will see imo huge differences for a relatively small cost 2-6x cost as well as having more options for regions/flavors. now if you went from that to teas that cost 1$+ a cup there will be far less in the way of differences and i feel like your probably getting into ‘wine territory’ blind taste tests where the majority of people cant tell which is better and where subjective opinions and perceptions matter more than the differences between.

as far as how much people should be willing to pay, i think it should be as much as they can afford and as much as they can appreciate it. if you take someone whos never drank tea before in their life and give them the best teas in the world they may not be able to appreciate or even see considerable difference between a far far cheaper tea. but if you have considerable disposable income and you enjoy higher quality/more nuanced/cleaner teas then by all means spend 50$/oz if you can afford it and it makes you happy.

cant hurt to have more reviews/transparency as long as we dont get caught up in the bull***t. i kind of like the sample thing tea sites have going on, im not sure i’d want that going away in favor of some arbitrary/abstract grading system.