How We Choose Which Green Teas to Stock (and the Five That Didn't Make It)
We carry three green teas in the catalog right now. We've turned down five others in the last year. I'm going to walk through our filter — what we look for, what we reject, and the honest tradeoffs behind each decision.
If you've ever wondered why a small tea company has a small catalog, this is the answer. We don't carry every tea. We carry the ones that pass four tests, and we leave the rest on the shelf.
The four tests
Every green tea we consider has to pass four filters. They're not all weighted equally, but a tea that fails any one of them doesn't make it.
1. Origin specificity. Can we name the specific region, estate, or grower? Generic "green tea from China" doesn't pass. "Longjing from the West Lake district in Zhejiang, second pick, harvested in early April" does. The more specific the origin, the more we can verify what we're getting and stand behind it.
2. Freshness window. Green tea has the shortest freshness window of any tea we sell. The volatile aromatic compounds that give green tea its character (the grassy, marine, vegetal notes) degrade within 6–9 months of harvest. If a tea can't reach us within 4–5 months of harvest, the cup will be flat by the time you brew it. We reject teas that have sat in distribution for too long, even if the source is good.
3. Process integrity. Was the tea processed in a way that preserves what makes it interesting? For green tea, that means fixed (kill-green / pan-fired or steamed) within hours of plucking, rolled properly, and dried to the right moisture. If the processing was rushed or sloppy, the leaf will look dull and the cup will taste thin. We taste-test before committing.
4. Price we can justify. We need to be able to sell the tea at $20–$30 per 100g and have the math work for both us and the supplier. If a tea is great but the only way to source it would put it at $40+ per 100g, we don't carry it — that's a different kind of company than the one we're building.
A tea has to pass all four to make the catalog. Failing one is enough to reject.
What's in the catalog
The three green teas we currently carry:
- Sencha (our standard, single-estate from Shizuoka). Mid-grade, balanced, fresh.
- Hojicha (roasted green tea, our evening recommendation). Lower caffeine, toffee notes. We wrote about how to brew it here.
- Gyokuro (shade-grown, premium, smaller batch). High-grade, marine sweetness, more expensive.
These three cover most of what people want from green tea: a daily drinker, an evening drinker, and an occasion drinker. Different price points, different caffeine levels, different flavor profiles. The customer who wants all three has options. The customer who only wants one has a clear recommendation.
What didn't make it
We considered five green teas that didn't pass the filter. The list:
- Dragon Well (Longjing) from a generic supplier. Origin was specific, but the supplier couldn't verify the harvest date — they offered us "early spring" with no specific week. That fails the freshness test. We'd rather not carry it than carry a tea we can't vouch for the freshness of.
- A cheaper sencha from a bulk distributor. Tasted fine in the sample. Price was about 60% of what we currently pay. But the distributor couldn't tell us which prefecture it was from, and the leaf looked slightly older in the bag. Two filters failed.
- A matcha from a U.S. re-packager (not a Japanese source). Origin story was good on paper. Sample tasted fine. But we want to source matcha directly from Japan — re-packaged matcha in the U.S. has a worse freshness story (it was already shipped once, then broken down and re-shipped), and the cost savings weren't enough to justify the freshness hit.
- A jasmine green tea scented with synthetic jasmine. Real jasmine-scented green tea uses fresh jasmine blossoms layered with the tea multiple times over 12–24 hours. Synthetic jasmine flavoring is cheaper and consistent. We rejected the synthetic version because it doesn't pass the process integrity test — it's a different product than what we want to sell.
- An organic sencha from a small co-op. This one was the hardest rejection. Origin was specific, freshness was good, processing was clean. Price was 40% higher than our current sencha, which would put it at $32 per 100g. We could have absorbed the price for a "premium organic" tier. We chose not to because we already have our premium tier (gyokuro), and adding a second premium SKU at a similar price point would dilute the gyokuro's positioning. The tea was good. The catalog didn't need it.
That last one is the closest call. If customer demand for organic shifts, we may revisit. For now, the catalog stays at three.
The honest tradeoff
Carrying a small catalog has real downsides. A customer who wants a specific Japanese green tea (kabusecha, tencha, genmaicha with quality matcha) won't find it in our catalog. We're forcing some customers to look elsewhere.
We accept that tradeoff because the alternative — carrying 15 green teas at varying levels of quality and freshness — is a catalog we don't want to maintain. We can't taste-test 15 SKUs weekly. We can't verify freshness on 15 different supply chains. We can't confidently tell customers which one to drink for which purpose.
Three green teas, each with a clear purpose, each backed by a weekly taste test, each with a freshness story we can defend — that's the catalog size we can run.
If we ever expand, it'll be one tea at a time, only when we find something that passes all four tests and adds a flavor profile we don't already cover. We won't add a tea just to make the catalog look bigger.
How we taste-test
Every batch of green tea we receive gets a side-by-side tasting against the previous batch. The test is simple:
- Brew both batches at the same temperature (160°F for sencha, 175°F for hojicha, 140°F for gyokuro).
- Smell the dry leaf. The aroma should be present, green, and clean — grassy for sencha, toasted-grain for hojicha, marine-sweet for gyokuro.
- Smell the wet leaf after 30 seconds of steeping. The aroma should intensify, not fade.
- Taste at 60 seconds. The flavor should match what the previous batch tasted like, with minor seasonal variation.
- Taste at 90 seconds. If the longer steep produces a noticeably different cup, the leaf has enough character to handle variation.
If the new batch fails any of these — flat aroma, faded wet leaf, off-flavor, or wildly inconsistent with the previous batch — we reject the lot and source again. It happens about once every 4–6 batches. The supplier knows.
What this means for you
If you buy a green tea from us, you can be reasonably sure:
- It was harvested within the past 6 months (often closer to 3).
- We can name the region, the estate or co-op, and the harvest date.
- We've tasted the specific batch you're getting and compared it to the previous one.
- We're charging a price that we think reflects the cost of doing it right.
If you want a wider catalog of green teas, we're not the right company. We're the right company if you want three greens that we can vouch for, brewed with care, shipped fresh from a small roastery.
That's the trade. We think it's worth it.
Brew slow. Sip slow. Pick well.
If you want to read more about how we make these calls for the rest of the catalog, our how we pick which coffees to stock post covers the coffee version of this filter. For the brewing side of the three green teas we do carry, our how to brew a proper pot of hojicha post is the most popular place to start.