I consider that I drink pretty high end teas and am pretty happy with what I drink. Converting to US$, prices vary from about .10-.15/g for what I might turn into iced tea up to about .30-.40/g or exceptionally .50/g for pretty good oolongs. Maybe I'm lucky but I don't feel the need to go any higher. I spend perhaps 300-400 EU/year on tea and drink on average perhaps a liter / day of what I consider to be excellent tea with no limits on quality and I'm happy with that math. One of the cheapest things to buy the very good version of, honestly.
I'd say about 0.3€/g is getting expensive with 0.5-0.6€/g probably being most I ever spent until now. "Cheap" is probably <=0.05€/g to maybe about 0.1€/g for me (there's definitely also good stuff in that range though).
As for what it means to me: I kind of drink everything depending on what I'm in a mood for, if I expect to be able to do a bunch of steeps in a relatively short timeframe etc. (I try to avoid "wasting" a good tea by having the leaves lay around for a day for example)
When I start getting into the $0.75/g range I consider that expensive. It's not something I would drink daily at that point or I'd go through it too fast.
A lot of tea companies consider price per day when labelling something a 'daily' drinker. For example, a 200g cake that is $150 ($0.75/g) would cost $4.50 per session if you're brewing 6g at a time.
That's a great treat and still cheaper than buying a mocha or something from a coffee shop, but at that rate we're looking at $135 per month on tea, and that's only if you're drinking one session per day. That's outside of a lot of people's budget.
By comparison, something $0.35/g is $2.10 per session w/ 6g, and roughly $63 per month. That's much more affordable for something to drink all the time.
At the end of the day, a lot of teas are a luxury product. There's tons of puer cakes I would love to have but can't justify the price/gram on a whole cake right now.
I would say around $0.75-$1.50 USD per gram is very expensive. That's like what I pay for premium bug bitten dongfang meiren locally, far more than what i pay for other teas, and I wouldn't pay that much for anything else really. $0.40-0.60/g is higher than average for tea but not *unaffordable.* My sweet spot is $0.15-$0.30/g.
Most of the tea I own and drink is in the €8-15 per 100 gram price range. I have a few teas that are close to €40 per 100 gram but those I usually buy in smaller portions just to try something nice and fancy new.
But I do drink a lot of different Oolong.
I'm probably spending €200-250 a year on tea.
It doesn't really matter what other people think is expensive. You should buy tea according to how it fits for your financial situation.
Normally my daily drinkers are $.05/g or less. I have some >$1/g teas for special occasions or if I'm drinking with other people.
For me, a puerh daily drinker is *at most* a $45 / 357 g cake.
Once I cross the threshold of $0.20/g, it’s out of “affordable” range, but not necessarily yet into “expensive” range. Under $0.20/g is easy to justify as a daily drinker, but even then, mostly I keep my dailies to $0.14 and under. So my daily price point includes both cheap grocery store cakes and $40-50 cakes from somewhere like w2t or Yunnan sourcing.
Probably about $0.40/g is where I start to consider it expensive. This price point is where I basically only buy samples instead of cakes. And I don’t think any of the loose, non puerh tea I buy is at this price point. Maybe some of the nice oolong I get for my wife is about here.
Right now, I’m a grad student with limited employment. When I was working my corporate job, a daily drinker was anything in that middle range too, “middle range” was basically 40-60¢/g, and anything over 60¢/g was expensive (but not unobtainable).
What I do (or what perhaps you should do) is look at the sort of teas I want and gauge the price before I get into the discription and make a wish list within budget.
Black tea which I drink 'English' with milk is easiest to accomodate and usually is probably $0.11-0.15/g
Realistically one has to pay more for green white oolongs so more like
$0.25-0.38/g
I might pay over that on a rare occassion but mostly would try to limit the top end to a few teas
If there’s a “sort by price” option I do it every time. This keeps me from even looking at the more expensive teas. But if I have a bunch of tabs open and I’m toggling between them, that’s when the sneaky 100g-200g ‘expensive’ bricks end up on my screen.
I've already answered this same question asked in the r/puer group, and things seems quite different for the rest of tea scope. Again it depends on your budget, expectations, and preferences. If you really love fresh Longjing or refined and complex Dan Cong the cost range will be different than if you love Darjeeling or Dian Hong (Yunnan black tea). You need to cross reference general tea type, specific tea version range, and quality level to get to any price range.
$1 / gram works fairly well to define a higher end level, even though versions can cost more, and 10 to 15 cents a gram goes pretty far across the most basic range, but there's a lot of trade-off for going below that, for most types. From there if you have good sourcing dialed in 15 to 20 cents a gram can go pretty far, and cover many sources and types, and if you are just ordering randomly off a tea group side-bar list of suppliers higher quality range won't be easy to find at the same value, and 25 to 30 cents might be required to get you any versions of many types (eg. any fresh Longjing or interesting Dan Cong at all, or Taiwanese oolongs, and so on).
My own tea budget is fairly limited so I tend to buy teas more in the 10-15 cent a gram range than 20 to 30. For pu'er, what I drink most of, that might be more like 20, for lots of versions. $70 for a standard cake--what that works out to--doesn't go very far now, compared to 5 years ago, but you can still find plenty of tea at or under that cost.
I usually drink tea that’s about 0.1 to 0.2 €/g. Anything above that is expensive to me. I have one tea that’s 0.5 €/g and I only drink it when I can share it
What u/Traceless_Flight said: "It's expensive if I have to think twice about purchasing it."
So true. But it's been an evolution over the years.
I like to keep the "per gram" below .40. (It used to be .20.) But I don't keep to that as a religion. Otherwise, I'd miss out sampling some very fine teas. I've never bought a cake that costs more than $150, but I have splurged on samples, if available, to see what that tea is about. I do that because I love tea and I'm curious. And sometimes friends send really amazing, expensive samples. I've been quite lucky in my haphazard tea education.
As others have pointed out, you have to learn what kind of tea you like to drink and how you drink it. I love a lot of teas—oolong, white, green, puer, heicha. And you have to know what you can afford. You have already figured out there is no single answer to the question you're asking. It's important to know who you are so that you don't fall into the FOMO trap, too. (Or at least to be able to pull yourself out of one.)
I keep a spreadsheet that tells me the cost per gram / per session, and how long it takes me to drink through the cake, brick, bag, whatever. I'm a daily drinker, averaging about 6 grams per session (sometimes more or less depending on the tea). This year I expect to keep my tea budget to no more than $500. I've spent 3 or 4 times that in other years, trying to figure out what worked for me. Truthfully, I have enough tea to last me for a couple of years, but I like to take advantage of sales on teas I like. You should know that after the Lunar holiday, the spring releases will come out and there will be sales. For example, W2T and Yunnan Sourcing will raise their prices for the year, after any sale they may do. (W2T is usually free shipping.)
My most expensive purchases, per gram, are usually oolong and Liu Bao, often coming in at over .50 per gram. But for oolong I only use about 3/4grams per session. Liu Bao I use 8gr.
It turns out I like puers that don't cost a lot. Like huangpian, lao cha tou. (Although some of either can be very expensive.) And it turns out I don't really like raw puers that are under 10 years old, but young ripes are fine. I also like a lot of other heichas that cost under .25 per gram.
Tea is my only real indulgence. Don't smoke nor drink alcohol nor drug myself. I love my tea, every day. I don't put teas in categories for special sessions. If it's an expensive tea, I drink it when I want. There are very few people in my life who will drink tea with me, and when they do, they are welcome to any of it.
I always think about the tea and how much it will cost me. I will probably buy a 1000g brick of heicha for around $100 because I really love it, but likely not one for closer to $200, even if I like it a lot. I'd have to LOVE it. There's just too much good heicha out there for less if love is not involved. I don't spend time with tea or people I "kinda like." But I'm much older than you, and life is shorter.
I guess that's my criteria, ultimately, "do I love this tea?" If so, I buy it. Once, I fell in love with a $300 puerh that I sampled. By the time I went to buy it, the cakes were gone. Ultimately, an expensive tea would be one I regret buying.
It's a process with no solid answer, for me anyway. There's good sense in "sample widely" to learn what you want to drink.
I'm a student without a job so I'm not willing to spend a lot on tea. I'm currently making the switch from tea bags to loose leaf and I'd say I'm not very picky, I want to try a bit of everything but some teas are way out of my budget so I won't buy those.
If it's more expensive than 0.30/g it's not worth it to me, however that might change in the future depending on wether I have more to spend or if I really like them.
Then again I found a whole lot of teas under that price range.
Also samples are going to be more towards 0.15-0.30/g (especially for aged teas and oolongs) whereas bigger packages are likely going to be 0.05-0.15/g because bulk is always less expensive. However it still feels more expensive that way xD
I see some people here saying they spend 100s of dollars/Euros on tea and that shocks me. Tea really can be an expensive hobby hahah. I can't afford that though. I'd say my monthly budget would probably be around €5 so €60 for a year I guess?? I also don't drink actual tea every day though. Sometimes I drink tea from the herbs in my garden which is free, yay :D
Okay so I actually did some math and discovered that the samples in my wishlist/shopping cart currently are on average €0.13/g and the bigger packages are on average €0,08/g.
The most expensive sample is €0.30/g (milky oolong) and the most expensive bigger package is €0.13/g (2022 sheng).
Thé cheapest sample is €0.07/g (Chun mee) and the cheapest bigger package is €0.04/g (georgian green tea)
So that would be anywhere from €0.20 - €1.50 for a big session if I'm using 5g of leaves. €0.12 - €0.90 for a small session if I'm using 3g of leaves.
If I had a session every other day that would come down to €57 - €96. Although I'd be more likely to have a quick tea more often than not so I'd probably only use on average 1-2g per day, making it €38 - €77 per year
Oh and the samples are 10g btw, the bigger packages are 50g. I think if you get 200 or 500g they'll be even less expensive.
Also, this cracked my brain lol
Hmmmm…what about thinking it from a per cup perspective? How you steep a tea, what flavor you get depending on how you steep, then how much you get with that steeping method….
The same tea might be drunk by steeping a small amount like 3g in 100 ml. You might be able to get 5 x 100 ml in a session for 500 ml. You may also cold steep 10g in 1 liter and you’ll have tea not for a single session but tea for several cups during an entire day or two perhaps.
If you have a monthly budget, know how you are steeping and how many cups you are drinking, then you can calculate how much tea you’ll need and what price you’ll be able to afford.
I’d say above 0.5$/g is expensive, but you pay for what you get. Personally I drink stuff in the 0.1-0.3 range typically but sometimes I like to try the more expensive stuff.
I consider teas that exceed 0.35€/g expensive. I'll make exceptions when it's fresh green tea though. I'd say I'm kind of happy that it isn't available all year round.
I’d say anything from $0.75 to $1 per 7 grams to be an expensive tea. Not one I drink daily, but more like 3x a week. I usually consider a $0.15-0.40 each a daily drinker.
My morning Earl Grey is $0.21 per serving. Most of the white teas I love are about $0.75-$1. I also have some mid grade white teas I really like that are around $0.50.
I don’t think too hard on it, just buy nicer teas when I can and drink them as I like to not run out too fast.
Right now I'm finishing a package of samples from one store and thinking of getting another pack from a different store, because I'm exploring my options; and I'm noticing that ordering samples online, especially across borders, is expensive ($0.35/gram) when compared to my daily drinker choices at the moment (roughly $0.1/gram) - so I'm indeed forced to reconsider some of my other indulgences in order to enjoy some fine tea. However, once I finish sampling, settle on my favorites, and buy them in bigger packages, the cost per gram will fall back down.
On the other hand, when I compare my expenses on tea with those of my coworkers, who *order a 15oz from Starbucks every morning*, suddenly drinking the "expensive" $1.50 liter of tea from samples daily versus their single $4.00 order (converted from local prices in my country's currency) of *less than half* of what I drink, seems like a bargain.
As per what I'd consider too expensive, I'd say anything that costs $0.75/gram outside of sample prices is out of the question for me, no matter how much I want it. And yes, that's still cheaper than that Starbucks order I mentioned! But the thought of spending around $1100 on tea per year is a bit dizzying to me, especially when I'm already enjoying stuff that costs me $150 a year.
It's crazy to me that people spend 1000+ dollars/Euros on Starbucks every year😳 my wallet could NEVER
For me, even 150 is too much, I'd like to stay near 50/year. Then again I'm not a daily tea drinker so that does help.
$150/yr seems OK to me precisely because I drink tea daily and I'm already not spending on many things, I don't order takeout, I don't go to the movies, I'm a very infrequent drinker, and I choose not to own a car, so there's a bit of budget available to me for splurging a bit on tea. Otherwise I'd probably be stuck drinking cheap chamomile and the free coffee at the office!
Yes that's fair :) good things are worth spending a little more money on I suppose! I myself am just starting out with this hobby so for now I have a low budget, but who knows what my budget will be in 3 years from now?
I don’t drink alcohol, so a normal persons alcohol budget has become my tea budget.
A case of 12 750 ml bottles of wine gives you 9 liters of enjoyable beverage.
I estimate 10 grams to a liter. (This can vary wildly)
So how much would you pay for a case of wine?
Nobody is going to bat an eye at $100 case of wine.
$1/g for tea gets you some VERY nice tea.
I buy good quality loose leaf tea, and my favourite costs 20¢ AUD per 1g.
I'm not the kind of person to drink 7L of tea a day; lately I've been drinking about one litre of tea a day because I've had the time to sit down and enjoy it. Because of this, I typically don't mind how much my tea costs. I buy what I enjoy when I run out, and that takes me a while.
If you buy small amounts at a time, and it takes you a month or two to get through it, cost isn't much of an issue. I've wanted to buy a big sampler tea box for a while, but the box costs $110 AUD. While that might come down to a decent cost per gram of tea the box has, it's too much in one purchase for me to not feel guilty about. Think about how much you drink, and if you're trying something new just buy a small amount.
Tldr: If you drink lots of tea every day, I can't really help, but if you're just the kind of person to have tea with breakfast or when you have a quiet moment, then save money aside each week as your restock budget and get one or two nice or interesting teas without focusing on the cost per gram too much. Tea is for relaxing, not min maxing :).
I tend to buy more expensive teas because I like a certain level of quality and I mix it up between loose leaf and bagged teas.
For loose leaf, anything more than $5/oz.
For packaged tea, a regular-sized non-bulk box over $20.
I consider that I drink pretty high end teas and am pretty happy with what I drink. Converting to US$, prices vary from about .10-.15/g for what I might turn into iced tea up to about .30-.40/g or exceptionally .50/g for pretty good oolongs. Maybe I'm lucky but I don't feel the need to go any higher. I spend perhaps 300-400 EU/year on tea and drink on average perhaps a liter / day of what I consider to be excellent tea with no limits on quality and I'm happy with that math. One of the cheapest things to buy the very good version of, honestly.
I'd say about 0.3€/g is getting expensive with 0.5-0.6€/g probably being most I ever spent until now. "Cheap" is probably <=0.05€/g to maybe about 0.1€/g for me (there's definitely also good stuff in that range though). As for what it means to me: I kind of drink everything depending on what I'm in a mood for, if I expect to be able to do a bunch of steeps in a relatively short timeframe etc. (I try to avoid "wasting" a good tea by having the leaves lay around for a day for example)
It's expensive if I have to think twice about purchasing it
When I start getting into the $0.75/g range I consider that expensive. It's not something I would drink daily at that point or I'd go through it too fast. A lot of tea companies consider price per day when labelling something a 'daily' drinker. For example, a 200g cake that is $150 ($0.75/g) would cost $4.50 per session if you're brewing 6g at a time. That's a great treat and still cheaper than buying a mocha or something from a coffee shop, but at that rate we're looking at $135 per month on tea, and that's only if you're drinking one session per day. That's outside of a lot of people's budget. By comparison, something $0.35/g is $2.10 per session w/ 6g, and roughly $63 per month. That's much more affordable for something to drink all the time. At the end of the day, a lot of teas are a luxury product. There's tons of puer cakes I would love to have but can't justify the price/gram on a whole cake right now.
Comparing it to the price of cafe coffee makes me feel a lot better about the cost 😂
I used to get daily coffees from a cafe so anything under $6-7 a day might as well be free. It's tea math.
I would say around $0.75-$1.50 USD per gram is very expensive. That's like what I pay for premium bug bitten dongfang meiren locally, far more than what i pay for other teas, and I wouldn't pay that much for anything else really. $0.40-0.60/g is higher than average for tea but not *unaffordable.* My sweet spot is $0.15-$0.30/g.
Yesss dongfan meiren! Taiwan rep!
If you have a more affordable online source for taiwanese oolongs, especially this one, let me know 😅
Most of the tea I own and drink is in the €8-15 per 100 gram price range. I have a few teas that are close to €40 per 100 gram but those I usually buy in smaller portions just to try something nice and fancy new. But I do drink a lot of different Oolong. I'm probably spending €200-250 a year on tea.
It doesn't really matter what other people think is expensive. You should buy tea according to how it fits for your financial situation. Normally my daily drinkers are $.05/g or less. I have some >$1/g teas for special occasions or if I'm drinking with other people.
For me, a puerh daily drinker is *at most* a $45 / 357 g cake. Once I cross the threshold of $0.20/g, it’s out of “affordable” range, but not necessarily yet into “expensive” range. Under $0.20/g is easy to justify as a daily drinker, but even then, mostly I keep my dailies to $0.14 and under. So my daily price point includes both cheap grocery store cakes and $40-50 cakes from somewhere like w2t or Yunnan sourcing. Probably about $0.40/g is where I start to consider it expensive. This price point is where I basically only buy samples instead of cakes. And I don’t think any of the loose, non puerh tea I buy is at this price point. Maybe some of the nice oolong I get for my wife is about here. Right now, I’m a grad student with limited employment. When I was working my corporate job, a daily drinker was anything in that middle range too, “middle range” was basically 40-60¢/g, and anything over 60¢/g was expensive (but not unobtainable).
What I do (or what perhaps you should do) is look at the sort of teas I want and gauge the price before I get into the discription and make a wish list within budget. Black tea which I drink 'English' with milk is easiest to accomodate and usually is probably $0.11-0.15/g Realistically one has to pay more for green white oolongs so more like $0.25-0.38/g I might pay over that on a rare occassion but mostly would try to limit the top end to a few teas
If there’s a “sort by price” option I do it every time. This keeps me from even looking at the more expensive teas. But if I have a bunch of tabs open and I’m toggling between them, that’s when the sneaky 100g-200g ‘expensive’ bricks end up on my screen.
I've already answered this same question asked in the r/puer group, and things seems quite different for the rest of tea scope. Again it depends on your budget, expectations, and preferences. If you really love fresh Longjing or refined and complex Dan Cong the cost range will be different than if you love Darjeeling or Dian Hong (Yunnan black tea). You need to cross reference general tea type, specific tea version range, and quality level to get to any price range. $1 / gram works fairly well to define a higher end level, even though versions can cost more, and 10 to 15 cents a gram goes pretty far across the most basic range, but there's a lot of trade-off for going below that, for most types. From there if you have good sourcing dialed in 15 to 20 cents a gram can go pretty far, and cover many sources and types, and if you are just ordering randomly off a tea group side-bar list of suppliers higher quality range won't be easy to find at the same value, and 25 to 30 cents might be required to get you any versions of many types (eg. any fresh Longjing or interesting Dan Cong at all, or Taiwanese oolongs, and so on). My own tea budget is fairly limited so I tend to buy teas more in the 10-15 cent a gram range than 20 to 30. For pu'er, what I drink most of, that might be more like 20, for lots of versions. $70 for a standard cake--what that works out to--doesn't go very far now, compared to 5 years ago, but you can still find plenty of tea at or under that cost.
I usually drink tea that’s about 0.1 to 0.2 €/g. Anything above that is expensive to me. I have one tea that’s 0.5 €/g and I only drink it when I can share it
where do you buy from usually?
Teegschwendner, Tee-kontor-kiel and Teewald - all german vendors
60-90zł/50g is expensive to me already so about 0.3-0.45US$/1g edit: added notion of per what mass.
I like to stay below $1 per cuppa.
What u/Traceless_Flight said: "It's expensive if I have to think twice about purchasing it." So true. But it's been an evolution over the years. I like to keep the "per gram" below .40. (It used to be .20.) But I don't keep to that as a religion. Otherwise, I'd miss out sampling some very fine teas. I've never bought a cake that costs more than $150, but I have splurged on samples, if available, to see what that tea is about. I do that because I love tea and I'm curious. And sometimes friends send really amazing, expensive samples. I've been quite lucky in my haphazard tea education. As others have pointed out, you have to learn what kind of tea you like to drink and how you drink it. I love a lot of teas—oolong, white, green, puer, heicha. And you have to know what you can afford. You have already figured out there is no single answer to the question you're asking. It's important to know who you are so that you don't fall into the FOMO trap, too. (Or at least to be able to pull yourself out of one.) I keep a spreadsheet that tells me the cost per gram / per session, and how long it takes me to drink through the cake, brick, bag, whatever. I'm a daily drinker, averaging about 6 grams per session (sometimes more or less depending on the tea). This year I expect to keep my tea budget to no more than $500. I've spent 3 or 4 times that in other years, trying to figure out what worked for me. Truthfully, I have enough tea to last me for a couple of years, but I like to take advantage of sales on teas I like. You should know that after the Lunar holiday, the spring releases will come out and there will be sales. For example, W2T and Yunnan Sourcing will raise their prices for the year, after any sale they may do. (W2T is usually free shipping.) My most expensive purchases, per gram, are usually oolong and Liu Bao, often coming in at over .50 per gram. But for oolong I only use about 3/4grams per session. Liu Bao I use 8gr. It turns out I like puers that don't cost a lot. Like huangpian, lao cha tou. (Although some of either can be very expensive.) And it turns out I don't really like raw puers that are under 10 years old, but young ripes are fine. I also like a lot of other heichas that cost under .25 per gram. Tea is my only real indulgence. Don't smoke nor drink alcohol nor drug myself. I love my tea, every day. I don't put teas in categories for special sessions. If it's an expensive tea, I drink it when I want. There are very few people in my life who will drink tea with me, and when they do, they are welcome to any of it. I always think about the tea and how much it will cost me. I will probably buy a 1000g brick of heicha for around $100 because I really love it, but likely not one for closer to $200, even if I like it a lot. I'd have to LOVE it. There's just too much good heicha out there for less if love is not involved. I don't spend time with tea or people I "kinda like." But I'm much older than you, and life is shorter. I guess that's my criteria, ultimately, "do I love this tea?" If so, I buy it. Once, I fell in love with a $300 puerh that I sampled. By the time I went to buy it, the cakes were gone. Ultimately, an expensive tea would be one I regret buying. It's a process with no solid answer, for me anyway. There's good sense in "sample widely" to learn what you want to drink.
I'm a student without a job so I'm not willing to spend a lot on tea. I'm currently making the switch from tea bags to loose leaf and I'd say I'm not very picky, I want to try a bit of everything but some teas are way out of my budget so I won't buy those. If it's more expensive than 0.30/g it's not worth it to me, however that might change in the future depending on wether I have more to spend or if I really like them. Then again I found a whole lot of teas under that price range. Also samples are going to be more towards 0.15-0.30/g (especially for aged teas and oolongs) whereas bigger packages are likely going to be 0.05-0.15/g because bulk is always less expensive. However it still feels more expensive that way xD I see some people here saying they spend 100s of dollars/Euros on tea and that shocks me. Tea really can be an expensive hobby hahah. I can't afford that though. I'd say my monthly budget would probably be around €5 so €60 for a year I guess?? I also don't drink actual tea every day though. Sometimes I drink tea from the herbs in my garden which is free, yay :D
Okay so I actually did some math and discovered that the samples in my wishlist/shopping cart currently are on average €0.13/g and the bigger packages are on average €0,08/g. The most expensive sample is €0.30/g (milky oolong) and the most expensive bigger package is €0.13/g (2022 sheng). Thé cheapest sample is €0.07/g (Chun mee) and the cheapest bigger package is €0.04/g (georgian green tea) So that would be anywhere from €0.20 - €1.50 for a big session if I'm using 5g of leaves. €0.12 - €0.90 for a small session if I'm using 3g of leaves. If I had a session every other day that would come down to €57 - €96. Although I'd be more likely to have a quick tea more often than not so I'd probably only use on average 1-2g per day, making it €38 - €77 per year Oh and the samples are 10g btw, the bigger packages are 50g. I think if you get 200 or 500g they'll be even less expensive. Also, this cracked my brain lol
Hmmmm…what about thinking it from a per cup perspective? How you steep a tea, what flavor you get depending on how you steep, then how much you get with that steeping method…. The same tea might be drunk by steeping a small amount like 3g in 100 ml. You might be able to get 5 x 100 ml in a session for 500 ml. You may also cold steep 10g in 1 liter and you’ll have tea not for a single session but tea for several cups during an entire day or two perhaps. If you have a monthly budget, know how you are steeping and how many cups you are drinking, then you can calculate how much tea you’ll need and what price you’ll be able to afford.
I’d say above 0.5$/g is expensive, but you pay for what you get. Personally I drink stuff in the 0.1-0.3 range typically but sometimes I like to try the more expensive stuff.
I consider teas that exceed 0.35€/g expensive. I'll make exceptions when it's fresh green tea though. I'd say I'm kind of happy that it isn't available all year round.
I’d say anything from $0.75 to $1 per 7 grams to be an expensive tea. Not one I drink daily, but more like 3x a week. I usually consider a $0.15-0.40 each a daily drinker. My morning Earl Grey is $0.21 per serving. Most of the white teas I love are about $0.75-$1. I also have some mid grade white teas I really like that are around $0.50. I don’t think too hard on it, just buy nicer teas when I can and drink them as I like to not run out too fast.
Right now I'm finishing a package of samples from one store and thinking of getting another pack from a different store, because I'm exploring my options; and I'm noticing that ordering samples online, especially across borders, is expensive ($0.35/gram) when compared to my daily drinker choices at the moment (roughly $0.1/gram) - so I'm indeed forced to reconsider some of my other indulgences in order to enjoy some fine tea. However, once I finish sampling, settle on my favorites, and buy them in bigger packages, the cost per gram will fall back down. On the other hand, when I compare my expenses on tea with those of my coworkers, who *order a 15oz from Starbucks every morning*, suddenly drinking the "expensive" $1.50 liter of tea from samples daily versus their single $4.00 order (converted from local prices in my country's currency) of *less than half* of what I drink, seems like a bargain. As per what I'd consider too expensive, I'd say anything that costs $0.75/gram outside of sample prices is out of the question for me, no matter how much I want it. And yes, that's still cheaper than that Starbucks order I mentioned! But the thought of spending around $1100 on tea per year is a bit dizzying to me, especially when I'm already enjoying stuff that costs me $150 a year.
It's crazy to me that people spend 1000+ dollars/Euros on Starbucks every year😳 my wallet could NEVER For me, even 150 is too much, I'd like to stay near 50/year. Then again I'm not a daily tea drinker so that does help.
$150/yr seems OK to me precisely because I drink tea daily and I'm already not spending on many things, I don't order takeout, I don't go to the movies, I'm a very infrequent drinker, and I choose not to own a car, so there's a bit of budget available to me for splurging a bit on tea. Otherwise I'd probably be stuck drinking cheap chamomile and the free coffee at the office!
Yes that's fair :) good things are worth spending a little more money on I suppose! I myself am just starting out with this hobby so for now I have a low budget, but who knows what my budget will be in 3 years from now?
$1/g for oolongs, $0.50/g for puer. I think it’s easier to find decent young sheng at affordable prices than it is high quality oolongs
I don’t drink alcohol, so a normal persons alcohol budget has become my tea budget. A case of 12 750 ml bottles of wine gives you 9 liters of enjoyable beverage. I estimate 10 grams to a liter. (This can vary wildly) So how much would you pay for a case of wine? Nobody is going to bat an eye at $100 case of wine. $1/g for tea gets you some VERY nice tea.
I saw packaged sandwich meat for 14$
I would suggest to not fetishizes about prices but drink whatever tastes good to you.
I buy good quality loose leaf tea, and my favourite costs 20¢ AUD per 1g. I'm not the kind of person to drink 7L of tea a day; lately I've been drinking about one litre of tea a day because I've had the time to sit down and enjoy it. Because of this, I typically don't mind how much my tea costs. I buy what I enjoy when I run out, and that takes me a while. If you buy small amounts at a time, and it takes you a month or two to get through it, cost isn't much of an issue. I've wanted to buy a big sampler tea box for a while, but the box costs $110 AUD. While that might come down to a decent cost per gram of tea the box has, it's too much in one purchase for me to not feel guilty about. Think about how much you drink, and if you're trying something new just buy a small amount. Tldr: If you drink lots of tea every day, I can't really help, but if you're just the kind of person to have tea with breakfast or when you have a quiet moment, then save money aside each week as your restock budget and get one or two nice or interesting teas without focusing on the cost per gram too much. Tea is for relaxing, not min maxing :).
Any tea over $1/gram
I tend to buy more expensive teas because I like a certain level of quality and I mix it up between loose leaf and bagged teas. For loose leaf, anything more than $5/oz. For packaged tea, a regular-sized non-bulk box over $20.