One thing you read on tea blogs is that in order to educate yourself, you have to “pay tuition” by buying – and drinking – lots of tea. Clearly, the best way to learn about tea is to drink tea, but for new tea people it can be difficult to know where to start. I wrote this guide to provide an overview of my tea sampling strategy, as well as some tips for keeping “tuition” costs low.





If you have a limited tea budget – say $60 every other month – then there are a few things that you have to consider. First, you will want to place a large enough sample order to provide a variety of tea. The more samples you drink, the quicker you will learn what’s good and, importantly, what you enjoy. Second, you will want to buy enough tea to last until your next order. For me, that is about 5-6g per evening session or about 300g total. Third, you want to place a large enough order to receive free-shipping, or to justify paying for shipping.



Also keep in mind that because you want to limit shipping costs, it is probably best to find a single vendor who you can buy a range of samples from at reasonable prices. Moreover, you will want to strike a balance between price and quality and price per gram (preferably in that order).





Here are three examples:

For illustration purposes, I assume you want to maximize the number of samples, order at least 300g, and stay under $60 (including shipping).

Starting with the worst option for sampling, companies like Mei Leaf offer very small sample sizes (3-8g, avg. 5g) and relatively high prices. Consequently, a $50 order – not including shipping – from Mei Leaf might get you 15 samples, but only about 75g of tea ($0.67/g). At 5g per evening session, this will only last you two weeks. This is not a good “bang for your buck” and not worth the cost.

Alternatively, companies like Yunnan Sourcing are great because their teas are good quality and well priced. However, shipping isn’t free and “sample sizes” are much larger at 25g each (50g for the .us site). Thus, a $60 purchase of tea (from the .us site, with shipping) will get you 6 teas (50g each), or 300g of tea total (avg. $0.20/g). This is a great “price per gram,” but it will take a very long time to try all of the major tea types. Plus, if you don’t like a particular tea, you are stuck with 45g of tea you won’t be drinking.*

*This said, sampling teas from YS might be a good option for someone with a higher monthly tea budget. Assuming you want to focus on Chinese teas and will drink 50g samples (perhaps a couple), then YS is the better option.

If you did want to go this route, here is a sample cart:

Total: $59.80 (including $7 shipping)

My personal preference is buying 10g samples, which is enough tea for one gongfu session (about 6g) and another session of either grandpa style (3g) or western style (4g) brewing. One of the best companies for this sort of sampling is What-Cha, who has both a wide variety of teas (120+ at last count) and 10-25g sample sizes. What-Cha also offers free shipping on orders over $45.



When I make an order from What-Cha, I usually buy between 10-15 teas at a time, usually between 10-25g each, which is about 250g ($0.24/g). I also try to order larger amounts (lower price/gram) on teas I know I will probably like.



For example, you might order the following:

Total: $59.44 (with free shipping)

That’s eleven teas for under $60, shipping included. Obviously you wouldn’t get more than a couple sessions with a few of the teas here, but you also get slightly more tea total (315g, or $0.19/g). This is what I’ve been doing and so far I have ordered about 32 teas from What-Cha (not including free samples). That’s about 25% of the teas offered on the site and over 500g total.





There are a couple downsides to this method of buying tea:

First, the biggest issue has to do with sample markup, which is going to be different for each vendor. Some quick multiplication shows that both What-Cha and Yunnan Sourcing markup their sample sizes about 2x higher (per gram) than the larger sizes (e.g., the price per gram at 10g is 2x that of the price per gram at 100g). That’s a lot of money, but it is the price you pay (”tuition”) for trying lots of different types of tea.



Second, once you start buying samples, you will start to figure out what you do and don’t like. (Oolongs, not greens; fruity, not floral.) At this point you’ll have to balance (1) having tea that you know you will enjoy on hand and (2) buying new samples to try. There is also a struggle between sampling (generalizing) and specializing. Next month should I buy random samples from What-Cha or do I make a special order of just puerh from White2Tea or Yunnan Sourcing?

For example, some months you may want to forgo your normal What-Cha sample order and instead try a bunch of puerh samples from White2Tea. I did the math and buying 25g samples of every White2Tea puerh cake priced under $50 would cost about $70 (including shipping) for 13 teas, or 325g total ($0.22/g). That’s a little more than you’d normally spend, but it still fulfills the other requirements. Making occasional orders like this can help you delve more deeply into categories you think that you’ll enjoy (or just want to learn about).



In the end, it’s up to you to decide how best to “pay tuition” in this hobby. Maybe you want to sample slowly, but buy enough of a tea to sample it multiple times. The upside is minimizing cost (lower price/gram); the downside is maximizing the time it takes to sample lots of teas. The opposite is true if you want to minimize time by sampling exclusively. I can easily pick 30 10g samples from What-Cha (or Mei Leaf), but that’s going to cost way, way more money. I chose something of a middle ground and it’s worked well for me.

