Buy loose-leaf tea online. True teas, herbal blends, yerba mate, and guayusa.

about the shelf

Loose leaf vs tea bags

Every tea on the shelf is loose-leaf and whole — never the dust-grade fannings that show up in commodity bags. The flavor difference is night and day: more aromatic, more depth, and you can re-steep most of them three or four times.

The reason comes down to leaf grades. Tea is graded by the size of the leaf, from whole leaves at the top down through broken leaf, fannings, and finally dust, the tiny particles left at the end of processing. Commodity tea bags are usually filled with those last two grades because they brew fast and cheap. Whole leaf trades that speed for everything else: intact leaves keep their essential oils until hot water unfurls them, so a pot of loose leaf tea gives you the aromatics the plant actually made. It also stretches further than the price tag suggests, since good whole leaf re-steeps where a bag of dust is spent after one cup.

True tea vs herbal tea

The "true teas" (black, green, white, oolong, matcha) all come from one plant: Camellia sinensis. The differences between them are about how the leaves are oxidized after harvest, not which plant they came from. Everything else — rooibos, hibiscus, chamomile, our house blends — is technically a tisane rather than a tea, but who's counting.

In practice the split matters for two things: caffeine and brewing. True teas carry caffeine, from the gentle lift of a white tea to a brisk Irish breakfast, while most tisanes are naturally caffeine-free. The exceptions are the South American hollies: yerba mate and guayusa are caffeinated and worth knowing about if you want tea-strong energy without coffee jitters. The brewing tools section covers tea balls, cup-and-pot strainers, and the gear we actually use at home.

How to brew loose leaf tea

The short version: use about one teaspoon of leaf per 6 oz cup (a heaped tablespoon per 8 oz for fluffy herbal blends), match the water to the leaf, and taste as you go. Green and white teas like cooler water, around 175–180°F, and short steeps so they stay sweet instead of bitter. Black teas and most herbals want hotter water, up to a full boil, and a longer steep. Oolongs sit in between. Matcha is its own thing entirely: whisked into the water, never steeped.

Those ranges cover almost everything on this page, and whole-leaf teas are forgiving, so treat them as starting points. For per-type numbers, the full tea infusion reference below charts leaf amount, water temperature, and steep time for every style we carry, from black to rooibos to maté.

Herbal teas and botanicals

Herbs and teas have always shared a counter at our shop, and the herbal side of the shelf is where the two meet. House tisanes like Hibiscus Mint and Mother Earth are blended in small batches at the shop, and single-origin classics like rooibos and honeybush come from the South African cape. If you'd rather build your own blend, the herbs and spices library stocks the raw ingredients by weight: chamomile, peppermint, lavender, rose, and a couple hundred more.

One botanical gets its own corner of the shop: blue lotus. If that's what you're after, everything we carry lives on the blue lotus page, including whole flowers for steeping.

How to store loose leaf tea

Tea's enemies are light, air, heat, moisture, and strong smells, in roughly that order. Keep leaf in an airtight, opaque container in a cool cupboard, away from the stove and the spice rack, and it will hold its character for a long time: most true teas stay lively for a year or two, and roasted or oxidized styles even longer. Whole leaf ages far more gracefully than dust-grade fannings, which is one more argument for buying loose. Buy in amounts you'll drink through in a few months and the last cup will taste like the first.