TeaHQ

A reference for tea, built so that what it does not know is as visible as what it does. Find a tea by how it tastes, compare any two, and get brewing parameters transcribed from the tea's own record rather than from a rule of thumb.

Find a tea

Filter 302 teas by flavour, aroma, mouthfeel, intensity and five other facets. Every result explains why it matched, and every facet is recorded for every tea — so nothing is silently left out of a search.

Compare two teas

Any pair, across seven dimensions, with no verdict and no winner. 615 comparisons are written out in full, including the pairs people most often confuse.

Brew it properly

Temperature, leaf weight for your vessel, ratio and the full infusion schedule. Where parameters have not been authored for a style, the tool says so instead of scaling them from another.

Follow a journey

42 ordered paths through the catalogue. Each step is explained by a relationship somebody wrote down about those two specific teas — never generated from shared tags.

All tools — what each one calculates, what it refuses to calculate, and why.

Start with a category

Six categories, all from the same plant. What separates them is a decision made in the hours after picking rather than where they grew.

What TeaHQ covers

Tea — the leaf of Camellia sinensis, in its six categories. 302 named teas with origin, production, sensory profile and brewing parameters.

Prepared drinks — masala chai, bubble tea and their relatives. These are recipes rather than origins, so they are modelled separately: a recipe has components, not a place.

Botanicals — chamomile, rooibos, peppermint and 201 others. Not tea, and catalogued for what they are, where they came from and what people do with them. Browse them.

What those pages do not carry is safety information — tolerability, interactions, pregnancy. That is a claim about bodies rather than about plants, it needs a different kind of evidence, and it stays unpublished behind a review that has not been signed.

How to read what is missing

There are no benefit claims here and no tool that asks what you want tea for. Tea for… records which plants people associate with which searches and why — a named tradition, a market convention, or a fact about what is in the leaf. None of those is evidence that anything works, each page says so, and no field in the model could record it if it were: the records that assess effect are deliberately unpublished.

Caffeine figures are absent for most teas for a related reason: a number without its basis is decoration, and we will not infer one from a tea’s category.

How TeaHQ decides what to publish

Where tea comes from

The chain from a bush to a cup, each link with its own pages.

42 producing countries — what each actually grows, and how its industry is organised.
233 growing regions — elevation, climate and protected designations, with the uncertainty on each figure stated.
186 cultivars — the level of tea botany most writing skips, and the level that decides a lot of the cup.
77 processing steps — in the order leaf moves through a factory. In tea, processing is the category.
The tea economy — production, trade and price as dated figures, with the two incompatible measurement bases kept apart rather than averaged.

Making it, and getting it wrong

28 brewing methods — from gongfu to a çaydanlık, none of them derived from another by arithmetic.
118 pieces of teaware — what each is for, what to use instead, and which pairs get confused.
Troubleshooting — bitter, astringent, weak and flat are four different faults with four different fixes.
15 prepared drinks — recipes rather than origins, with their regional variation stated rather than flattened.

What people drink it for

People search for tea by what they want from it. TeaHQ answers the part of that which can be answered — who drinks what, where, and why those particular plants — and is explicit that none of it is evidence that anything works.

59 functional searches — sleep, digestion, energy, focus and the rest, each listing the plants that appear under it and stating on what basis: a named tradition, a market convention, or a fact about what is in the leaf.
26 plants, tradition by tradition — who drank it, where, in what period, in what preparation, and what that tradition itself says the practice is for. Recorded one tradition at a time, because they frequently disagree.

Understanding it

457 guides — how processing works, why tea tastes bitter, how it is traded, how to buy and store it.
A chronology of 48 events — two thousand years in order, with every date labelled for what kind of date it is: fixed by a record, estimated, rounded to a century, disputed, or carried by tradition.
105 living traditions and customs — what people actually do, from chanoyu to a flask of leaf topped up all day. Every section labelled as documented, disputed, legend or living practice.
52 compounds — what is in the leaf and what each does to the cup, kept firmly separate from what any of it might do to a person.
615 comparisons — side by side, with no winner declared anywhere.
A glossary of 106 terms — several included because the common definition is wrong rather than because the word is obscure.
Browse everything — the whole site, with live counts.
Sources and evidence — what counts as a source here and how far each one was checked.

The catalogue holds 302 teas and 8887 relationships between records, all validated on every build — and coverage is uneven in places that are documented rather than smoothed over. Most of what is written here rests on TeaHQ’s own synthesis rather than on an external document, and every page that does says so on its own face.