Premium Tea Brands - Loose Leaf and Tea Bags

The label "Premium" is subjective and is in the eye of the beholder. Any company can choose to market themselves as "premium" but this doesn't guarantee that they have the quality to back it up.

In my opinion, the true premium brands of tea are the companies focusing on loose-leaf tea. These include such tea companies as Upton Tea Imports, Rishi Tea, and Teavana, but they also include a large number of smaller tea companies. I cannot possibly do justice to all of the best companies selling premium teas. I myself am a particular fan of Upton.

Many of best teas are only available in loose-leaf form. On another lens I explain more about why I prefer loose-leaf tea. However, some people use tea bags for convenience.

One important distinction is between tea bags and sachets. A sachet, pictured on the right, is a high-quality tea bag with higher-quality leaves, which gives the leaves room to expand. This is important with whole-leaf teas, which we discuss below. Any tea company can freely call their tea bags "sachets". What matters is the quality of the leaf inside, and whether or not the bag is large enough to allow the leaves to expand.

One of the most important distinctions when considering the quality of tea and locating premium-quality tea is the difference between whole-leaf tea and broken-leaf tea. Whole-leaf tea, pictured on the right, has fully intact leaves, whereas broken-leaf tea, as the name suggests, has leaves that have been broken into pieces.

Even more broken than broken-leaf tea are fannings, which are small pieces of broken leaf, left over after the higher grades of broken-leaf tea have been separated out. The lowest grade of tea is dust, which consists of fine particles of tea leaf, much smaller than what is typically called "fannings". RateTea has more info about grades of tea.

Whole-leaf tea is not always better than broken-leaf tea. You can find high-quality broken-leaf teas that are better (and sometimes also cheaper) than lower-quality whole-leaf teas. But whole-leaf vs. broken-leaf is an important distinction to make when searching for premium tea.

The region in which tea is grown impacts its flavor and aroma, not only due to cultural differences in the production process, but also due to innate natural factors such as climate and soil composition. Two teas grown in different areas and produced with identical processes may taste radically different.

Much tea on the world market is sold as bulk blends, which combine tea from a number of different regions. Although the blending process can produce a certain regularity or predictability in the characteristics of the tea, a lot of the uniqueness of the teas vanish when they are blended together.

A single-region tea is a tea from one region (such as a specific province of China, a prefecture of Japan, or sometimes even a more specific region). These teas are also called single-origin teas. Tea specified only as from India, China, and Japan are still generally considered blends. A single-estate tea is a tea from a specific, named tea garden.

One of the easiest ways to locate premium-quality tea is to seek out single-region teas, such as teas produced in a particular province or county of China, or in a specific district or region of India like Darjeeling or Assam. The next logical step from single-region teas is single-estate teas, which offer some of the richest and most unique tea-drinking experiences. If you wish to buy premium tea, you would do well to look at single-region and single-estate teas. However, blends are not always bad, nor are single-origin teas always better.

RateTea has a wealth of information about different tea-growing regions, what teas each region produces, and how the regions' climates and soil affect the tea's taste.

In addition to single-origin teas, also worth mentioning are single-harvest teas. These are teas that have been harvested at a specific time, rather than blends of tea harvested at different times.

In Darjeeling black tea, a particular system of flushes is used. First flush tea, harvested early in the spring, is the lightest in color and flavor and overall qualities. Second flush, harvested later, and autumnal flush, are both a little darker. The term "first flush" is also used with other varieties of tea, such as sencha.

Many Chinese and Taiwanese teas are single-harvest teas, picked at a specific time, and this information can sometimes be found by researching the tea or reading its commercial description. Most premium teas are single-harvest teas; if a tea does not identify a specific date of harvest, it's less likely to deserve the premium label.

A lot of inexperienced shoppers are often fooled by the idea that more expensive tea is necessarily better or higher in quality. The price of a tea sometimes, but not always corresponds to its quality. Price is a function of demand, and the well-known teas tend to have inflated prices, whereas esoteric teas are often under-valued.

On the other end of things, some shoppers can over-estimate the price-per-cup of high-quality teas that have a high price by weight. High-quality loose-leaf tea can offer oustanding value both because it has a superior flavor, and because it can be resteeped more times, using less leaf, thus giving a lower cost-per-cup than tea that seems less pricey.