About TeaHQ

TeaHQ is a catalogue of tea — 261 named teas with their origins, production, sensory profiles and brewing parameters — plus tools for finding, comparing and brewing them, and 133 guides explaining how the subject works.

It covers tea: the leaf of Camellia sinensis, in its six categories. It also covers prepared drinks made from tea, such as masala chai, which are recipes rather than origins and are modelled separately for that reason. It does not yet cover herbal infusions, which are not tea at all.

Tea writing has a specific failure mode. Confident numbers with no basis, oxidation percentages nobody measured, caffeine rankings by category that do not survive contact with the data, and legends repeated as history until they are indistinguishable from it.

The response here is structural rather than editorial. Every record is validated when the site builds. A brewing parameter is marked as recorded practice or as synthesis. A caffeine figure has to state the five things that determine it or it cannot be published. Content that makes a health claim cannot be published at all until a named person signs for it — and none has, so none is published.

The result is a site with visible gaps. That is the design, and the gaps are labelled so you can tell a decision from an omission.

• Find a tea by flavour, aroma, mouthfeel, intensity and eight other facets — every one of which is recorded for every tea, so nothing is silently excluded from a search.
• Compare any two teas across seven dimensions. There is no verdict and no winner.
• Get brewing parameters for a specific tea and style. Where they have not been authored, the tool says so instead of estimating.
• Follow a guided journey — 41 ordered paths where each step is explained by a relationship somebody wrote down.
• Browse all three tools, or read 335 comparisons, 133 guides and a glossary of the terms that are most often used wrongly.

Health and functional content.No “tea for sleep” pages, no benefit claims, no health filters in any tool. The records exist and are held behind a human review checkpoint that has not been signed.

Herbal infusions. Chamomile, rooibos and peppermint are not Camellia sinensis and carry their own safety model, including interactions and contraindications. That surface is held to the same standard and is not published.

Product recommendations. TeaHQ sells nothing, links to no vendor and carries no advertising. Where a tea is widely counterfeited, the page says so — which is more useful than a shopping link and is the closest this site comes to buying advice.

Everything above is a claim about how the site is built, and each part of it is written down somewhere you can read rather than taken on trust.

• Editorial policy — where a fact came from, what will never be inferred from a category, how uncertainty is shown, and why the health material is kept separate rather than written carefully.
• Sources and evidence — the classes of source, how thoroughly each was checked, what a TeaHQ synthesis is and is not, and the limit of what a taxonomic authority can support. That last one matters more than it sounds: the largest external source class on this site is taxonomic, and it is barred from saying anything about preparation, flavour or physiology.
• Glossary — the terms used consistently across the catalogue, including the ones the trade uses loosely.

If something here is wrong, say so. Corrections are recorded rather than quietly applied.

TeaHQ is operated by HEKNO Ltd. Editorial decisions and the governance rules described in the editorial policy are set by TeaHQ and not by any outside party.

Company details and contact information are on the contact page. The terms of use set out what TeaHQ is and — more usefully — what it is not.

TeaHQ is in private development and is not publicly indexed. The catalogue currently holds 1147 records and 1846 relationships between them, all validated on every build.

Coverage is uneven and the uneven parts are documented rather than smoothed over: caffeine estimates exist for a small minority of teas, cultural context is recorded only where it can be sourced, and history is recorded only where something documented actually happened.