Take a Fresh Look at Tea

Tea Deserves Attention

When considering that top teas, like the best wines, coffees, and spirits can provide a truly remarkable taste experience, it’s no surprise that this historic beverage is finally beginning to get the kind of recognition it deserves. As a matter of fact, we might very well be wit- nessing the beginning of a national passion for tea.

Sounds exaggerated ? Look at what tea has going for it.

Fine tea offers a level of subtlety, complexity and variety of flavors that only the finest wines can rival. In fact the parallels are remarkable: tea and wine both have extraordinary colorful histories, world-wide sources and amazingly varied tastes. Fine tea, like fine wine, is associated with estate production and reflects its origin to the connoisseur. Variations in manufacture, like the variations in wine making, account for the major types of tea. Among them, black, oolong, green and white teas constitute a range of tastes as broad that of red, white and rosé wines – without, of course, the alcohol. Furthermore, many tea lovers have a shelf of fine teas to suit every occasion and mood, just the way wine lovers keep a rack of their favorite wines on hand.

Tea also offers the coffee drinker an attractive alternative:
both are enormously popular mild stimulant beverages with colorful and exotic histories. What fine tea offers the gourmet coffee drinker is a refreshingly different taste experience – just as rich and satisfying, but much more subtle, refined and with less "jolt". A cup of tea has far less caffeine than a cup of coffee but its stimulating effects are longer lasting and gentler.

Of course there are those coffee drinkers who never drink tea (and vice versa), but we suspect that many of them would add tea to their range of gourmet interests if they only knew how satisfying truly fine tea is.

Fine tea is the perfect beverage for today’s world: it’s subtle, healthy and sophisticated, it stimulates and soothes. Whether enjoyed at home or at work, alone or in company, tea is a contemplative beverage that lends itself to reflection and relaxation; it tells us that the world can wait until the cup is finished.

But why did it take so long for fine tea to be discovered? The cost of it has never been a barrier for its enjoyment. In fact, fine teas are absurdly inexpensive for their quality and may very well be the world’s greatest gourmet bargain.

A pound of tea yields about 200 cups. This means that a price of $100 per pound for a rare, sought-after tea translates to only 50 cents per serving. Compare that to $1 a glass even for cheap wine - or $10 a pour for a rare Château Mouton Rothschild.

Perhaps the real reason fine tea has been largely ignored is that until recently many consumers did not know there was such a thing as high quality tea. Tea has been associated with its least appealing forms: artificially flavored iced-tea, cost-conscious tea-bag brews and cups of honey-and-lemon tea for winter coughs. Discriminating tea lovers had to search far and wide for fine teas, and until a few years ago could only read about the rarest and finest single-estate teas. SpecialTeas was created to supply those rare teas from countries like China, India, Japan and Sri-Lanka to the growing number of consumers who have discovered that fine tea is the most refined and civilized beverage of them all.

We invite you to browse through our catalog, learn about great teas, order from our carefully selected assortment and then, experience for yourself the world of SpecialTeas.