I get a lot of questions from readers asking me where to buy tea online. Generally, they ask me about specific teas and the one question they ask more than any other is where to buy matcha green tea. When it comes to buying matcha, my first answer is always, “go to Japan and get it there.”
A cup of matcha green tea
Of course, that is a bit of a sarcastic answer and perhaps a bit mean-spirited, but it is the truth. The best green tea powder is found in Japan and everything you get outside that country doesn’t even come close. Unfortunately, most people are not able to simply hop on a plane to Japan just to buy some tea. For these people, the best option is to buy from an online tea vendor.
Some people may live close to a specialty tea store, if they are in a big city and are extremely lucky and that tea store might carry high quality tea. If it does, great. You might pay a bit more than you would ordering tea online, but you have the advantage of being able to taste your tea before you buy it.
The rest of us need to use online tea shops. The problem with this is that there are so many tea stores to be found on the internet and the quality ranges from excellent to absolute crap. This is especially true with matcha. And because the stores are online, you can obviously not taste the tea as you could in a brick-and-mortar store. Some of these online shops offer sample sizes, though. You’ll have to pay for them, at least in most cases, but the sample tea packs are usually pretty cheap and are a great way to get a good idea of the quality of the store’s selection.
Once you’ve tried a sample of a tea and have found it to your liking, you can begin ordering larger quantities. Of course, if you find a sample of one type of tea to be great, that does not mean that other types offered by that tea shop are also great. Some tea shops have a few good quality teas and a whole bunch of crap. Because of this, I recommend ordering sample sizes of any tea you plan on eventually buying in larger quantities.
I realize this seems like a lot of work, but it is worth it when you find a great supplier who will always provide you with excellent quality teas, especially high quality green tea powder. I know there are many review sites on the internet that you could use, but tastes differ, so you might not like something that a reviewer loved and vice versa. On top of that, many of those reviewers get commissions when you purchase a tea they recommend, so you don’t really know who you can trust. Is a reviewer giving a glowing review to that Japanese green tea you are considering because he loves it or because he gets 20% of the sale price every time someone makes a purchase based on his recommendation? That is a question you need to ask yourself and it is the reason I prefer to try samples of every tea I plan on buying more of in the future.