Online Tea Stores Have the Best Green Teas Outside Asia

Green tea is the best tea in the world. We all know that. Don't get me wrong, white tea and oolong tea both taste amazing too, but the more expensive and the good varieties are harder to find. Black tea is great too, but not as good as the rest. Even though good varieties of green tea are easier to find than good varieties of other types of tea, it can still be a bit of a challenge if you don't live in Asia. That is why I generally recommend you buy your tea online.

Even in big cities in the west, where you will often find a number of specialty tea shops, you can't always be certain that you are getting the quality the tea store promises. Sometimes you do and sometimes you don't. I bought a number of teas from shops all over Europe and the US, and I've got some great varieties, but I've also gotten some pretty bad ones. And I usually end up overpaying for them, because these stores always seem to charge an inflated price.

Even in Asia, buy tea online before you get it at a touristy tea store like this one in Shanghai

The solution is obvious and I've already mentioned it above and many times in the past: in order to get the best quality and the best prices, you want to buy tea online. Or you want to travel to Asia. And when I say Asia, I mean Japan or China. Those are actually the only countries in Asia that drink good tea. Okay, maybe that's not quite fair to Malaysia and Indonesia, which do have some tea plantations, but not really that many. It's also not fair to India which has some pretty good tea itself, but that tea is marred by the fact that buying it is a bit dangerous—you will almost certainly get a fake product and thus a much lower quality product.

No, you want to buy your tea from an online tea vendor. The problem is there are so many that you face the same issue you would with a brick-and-mortar store. Who can you trust? Luckily, there are a few sites online that provide reviews of online tea shops and compare the various tea stores in terms of price, quality, selection and other factors. This allows shoppers like us to get all the necessary information and to make an informed decision.

Of course, there are still some risk involved as there is with any online purchase, but by informing yourself beforehand, you can minimize that risk. To do so even more, I suggest buying a small sample from a new tea vendor and seeing if they deliver on their promises. If they do, then you can move on to more expensive purchases and see if they offer good quality for a good price. In this way, you'll end up with one or two online tea stores that you trust. And with that, you never have to worry again when you go online to buy tea.