Why we pack tea small
The first question people ask us is why the packs are so small. Twenty five grams of the flower blend. Fifty grams of Darjeeling. It looks mean next to a supermarket box holding half a kilo for less money.
The answer is that tea is not a tin of oil. It does not sit still.
What actually goes wrong
Tea leaf holds volatile aromatic compounds, and volatile means exactly what it sounds like. They leave. Every time you open a tin, warm air comes in, moisture comes in, and a little more of what you paid for goes out.
Black tea is reasonably tough and will hold well for a year if it is stored properly. Green tea and flowers are not tough at all. A whole leaf Darjeeling that was extraordinary in March is merely pleasant by September and forgettable by the following March. Nothing has spoiled. It has just faded, quietly, in a way that is hard to notice because it happens a cup at a time.
So the half kilo box is only better value if you drink half a kilo quickly. Most households do not. They drink the first hundred grams while it is good and the remaining four hundred while it is fading.
The arithmetic nobody does
Work it out per good cup rather than per gram. A 50g pack of Darjeeling gives you roughly twenty five cups. If you drink them across six weeks, all twenty five taste the way the tea is supposed to taste. Buy 250g of the same tea and drink it across eight months, and perhaps forty of the hundred and twenty five cups are worth what you paid.
Small packs are not a way of charging you more. They are a way of making sure the tea you paid for is the tea you actually drink.
How to store what you have
Four things ruin tea: air, light, heat and smell. Tea is absorbent, which is why a tin kept next to the masala dabba slowly becomes masala.
- Keep it in an opaque, airtight container. The tin it arrived in is fine.
- Keep it away from the stove and out of direct sunlight.
- Keep it away from spices, coffee and anything strongly scented.
- Do not refrigerate it. Condensation on the leaf is worse than warm air.
Do that and a 50g pack will hold its character to the last spoon. Which is the whole point of selling it to you in fifty gram packs.
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