The units in circulation
Western speciality retail sells by the gram, usually in packs of twenty-five, fifty, one hundred and two hundred and fifty. Supermarket tea sells by the box and by the count of bags, with a net quantity in small print. Chinese retail uses the jin, a traditional unit standardised in modern usage at five hundred grams, and the liang, one tenth of it at fifty grams, and prices are frequently quoted per jin even where the sale is smaller. Compressed pu-erh is sold by the cake, most commonly at three hundred and fifty-seven grams, and in tongs of seven cakes and larger cases. Japanese retail sells by the gram in small packs, commonly a hundred grams or less for sencha and thirty or forty for matcha. None of these is a problem on its own and together they make casual price comparison almost impossible, which is why a buyer moving between markets should convert everything to a single basis before forming any impression. A price per jin and a price per fifty-gram pouch are the same kind of number expressed in units that differ by an order of magnitude, and the shock of the first is entirely an artefact of the unit.
Cost per cup is the number that matters
Price per hundred grams is the standard comparison and it is the wrong one, because different teas produce different numbers of cups from the same mass. A western mug takes something in the region of two to three grams for a single infusion. A gongfu session takes considerably more leaf and re-steeps it many times, so the same mass produces far more drink. A bagged tea is used once. Working out cost per cup rather than cost per hundred grams changes the ranking substantially and almost always in favour of the whole-leaf teas that support multiple infusions — which is the calculation that makes speciality tea look far less extravagant than its shelf price suggests, and the one almost nobody performs. It also exposes the opposite case honestly: a delicate tea used once in a large mug is expensive per cup regardless of how it looked on the shelf. The arithmetic takes a minute per tea and is worth doing once for a household’s regular purchases, because it changes buying habits more durably than any amount of advice about quality.
Why dosing by spoon corrupts the comparison
Density varies enormously between formats. Small dense particles pack far more tightly than fluffy whole leaf, so a level spoon of a fannings grade can hold several times the mass of the same spoon of a twisted white tea or an unrolled bai mudan. Anyone dosing by spoon is therefore silently varying their leaf-to-water ratio by category, which is one of the commonest causes of a cup that is unaccountably strong or weak, and it also makes any cost-per-cup calculation based on spoons meaningless. This is why the catalogue records doses by mass and by vessel volume rather than in spoons, and why a cheap kitchen scale is the single most useful piece of tea equipment a household can buy after a kettle. The same effect operates on the shelf. A hundred grams of a dense rolled oolong occupies a fraction of the volume of a hundred grams of a fluffy white tea, so two packs of identical mass can look like very different quantities, and the smaller-looking one is not the smaller purchase.
Size discounts, and when to take them
Per-gram price nearly always falls with pack size, and whether that is a saving depends entirely on the category. For an ageing tea it is a straightforward saving and there are additional reasons to buy in quantity: the tea is not declining, a larger quantity stored together buffers its own conditions better than a single piece, and owning enough of one tea to drink it across a decade is the only way to observe how it changes. For a robust black tea a larger pack is reasonable. For the fragile categories — Japanese green tea, spring Chinese green tea, matcha, unroasted oolong, fresh white tea — the discount should be read as a trap rather than a saving, because the last third of the pack will be a different product from the first. Matcha is the extreme case and the arithmetic is worth stating: a bowl of usucha uses a couple of grams, so a thirty-gram tin is roughly a fortnight of daily drinking and a hundred-gram tin is several months, which for anyone drinking it occasionally means the smallest size is very often the correct purchase even at a substantially higher price per gram.
Sample sizes and what they really cost
Samples run from about five to twenty-five grams and cost considerably more per gram than a full pack. That is the trade and it is a good one, because the alternative is a hundred grams of something you do not want, and because comparison is where nearly all learning about tea happens. Five to ten grams supports two or three western sessions; a gongfu session of a rolled oolong can use five grams on its own, so a ten-gram sample supports perhaps two and a slightly larger sample is sensible for teas meant to be brewed intensively. Sample packaging is worth noticing as well, since a sachet in sealed laminate keeps for months and one in a paper envelope or a zip bag does not, and samples are usually bought several at a time and worked through slowly. There is a further point that the storage pages make and that belongs here too: a small sealed portion has almost no headspace and is opened once, which is close to ideal storage for a fragile tea. Part of the reason samples so often taste better than the full-size purchase of the same tea is the packaging rather than the leaf.
Shipping, minimums and the true cost of an order
The last component of the price is the one that varies most between sellers and is invisible until checkout. Shipping is a real cost and a real delay, and it changes the ranking between two sellers more often than the tea prices do — which argues for fewer, larger sample orders from one seller rather than a scatter of single purchases, and for noticing free-shipping thresholds as the mechanism they are, which is a device to increase order size rather than a discount. Customs and import charges apply to orders crossing some borders and can be substantial, which is worth checking against the destination’s own guidance before ordering rather than after. The exception to consolidating orders is the fragile seasonal teas, where ordering promptly at the right time of year matters more than the postage, and a spring tea that arrives six weeks late has cost more than the shipping saved. Working the whole order out on a cost-per-cup-delivered basis is the version of this arithmetic that actually reflects what a household spends, and it is the only comparison that survives moving between markets, formats and units.