The test: could this sentence be false
TeaHQ's own reading of well-attested general knowledge, with no single source behind it.
The single most useful filter is to ask whether a claim could be checked and found wrong. Picked at high elevation in the Ali Shan area in the spring of a stated year, from the Qing Xin cultivar, lightly oxidised and unroasted is a set of statements that could each be false, and a seller who prints them has accepted that risk. A tea of exceptional quality, hand-picked with care by skilled artisans, offering a smooth and refreshing experience contains nothing that could be wrong, because nothing has been asserted. Copy of the second kind is not dishonest and it is not evidence. Applying this one test to a product page sorts the sentences into two piles within seconds, and it works without knowing anything about the category the tea belongs to. The test also works in reverse as a guide to writing. Anyone keeping their own tasting notes will find that the notes worth rereading a year later are the ones that committed to something specific enough to be wrong, and the ones that praised are useless. This is the same discipline applied to a private record rather than to a product page, and it is a large part of why the advice throughout this catalogue is to write three concrete words rather than a paragraph of appreciation.
Praise vocabulary standing in for description
TeaHQ's own reading of well-attested general knowledge, with no single source behind it.
Smooth, refreshing, well-balanced, complex, exceptional, delicate, rich, exquisite, and the phrase notes of followed by nothing specific. These words describe the writer’s approval rather than the tea, and because they appear across every category they cannot distinguish anything. Their reliable tell is that they survive substitution: if a description of a Japanese green tea reads equally well when applied to a Kenyan black tea, it was not about either. Contrast with a note that could only be about one tea — the mineral, wet-rock quality attributed to Wuyi teas, the marine edge of a deep-steamed sencha, the sweet-potato character commonly described in Dian Hong. Those may be conventional, but they are at least specific enough to be tested against a cup. A related and subtler failure is the description that is specific about the wrong thing. Elaborate detail about the packaging, the shop’s history, the ceremony or the region’s scenery can fill a page while telling a reader nothing about the leaf, and it reads as substantial because it is concrete. The question to keep asking is not whether the copy is specific but whether it is specific about the tea, which is a narrower and more demanding standard.
History without dates, and legend presented as record
A very large amount of tea copy opens with centuries of tradition, an emperor, a monk, or a discovery, none of it dated and none of it sourced. Some of these stories are documented and worth knowing; most are commercial narrative built on a folk tale, and the two are printed identically. The tells are the absence of a date, the absence of a name that could be looked up, and constructions such as for over a thousand years and since ancient times. A description that says a style was developed at a named place in a stated century and can point at who recorded it is doing something different from one that gestures at antiquity. TeaHQ separates documented history from tradition from popular myth in its own prose for exactly this reason, and a seller who does the same is unusual and worth noticing. Origin legends also have a recognisable structure that makes them easy to spot: a discovery by accident, a named but undatable figure, a period of imperial favour, and an unbroken tradition since. Any individual element may be true of a given tea, and the combination arriving without a single verifiable date is the tell. TeaHQ records such stories where they are culturally significant and labels them as legend, because a tradition’s stories are worth knowing and are not the same thing as its history.
Copy that describes the drinker instead of the leaf
A distinct family: descriptions of how the tea will make you feel, what kind of moment it suits, or what sort of person drinks it. Perfect for a quiet afternoon, an indulgent moment, a ritual of calm. This is lifestyle writing rather than product writing and it carries no information about the tea at all. It is worth flagging separately from ordinary vagueness because it is the register most likely to shade into claims about effects on a person, which is a line this catalogue does not cross and which a great deal of retail copy crosses without noticing. A description that has moved from what a tea tastes like to what it does has stopped being a tasting note, and the useful response is to look for the fields that were displaced to make room for it. There is a milder version that is harmless in itself and still worth recognising: copy that describes an occasion rather than an effect. Suggesting a tea suits a long afternoon is an editorial opinion about a pairing and does not pretend otherwise. The line worth watching is between describing when a tea is enjoyable and asserting what it will do, and a great deal of retail writing crosses it in a single clause without any apparent intention to make a claim.
Technical-sounding claims that are not measurements
The most misleading category, because it borrows the authority of specification. Oxidation percentages are the standard example — quoted everywhere, measured almost nowhere, with no routine instrument and no standard method behind them — and a page giving one is repeating a convention rather than reporting a figure. Antioxidant content given as a number without a method, caffeine figures given without stating leaf quantity, water volume, temperature, steep time and infusion number, and elevation figures given to the metre are all in the same family. A number without its basis is not a fact, it is decoration, and this catalogue rejects caffeine figures that do not carry a five-part basis for precisely that reason. Where a seller gives a producer-stated figure and says where it came from, that is a different and much better thing. A related family borrows the authority of history rather than of measurement: harvest dates given to the day for teas whose supply chains do not record days, ages given precisely for cakes whose provenance is unverifiable, and altitude figures repeated identically across every tea a seller lists from a region. Precision that exceeds what the supply chain could plausibly know is not a lie so much as a rounding of an estimate into a number, and it is worth noticing wherever a figure is finer than the process behind it.
What good copy looks like when you find it
It is specific enough to be wrong, it distinguishes what the seller knows from what they were told, and it states what is not known. Sentences such as the producer gives the cultivar as Saemidori but we have not been able to confirm the section, or this is sold as a spring picking and we do not have a date, are the strongest signals available on a product page, because nobody writes them unless they are trying to be accurate. Good copy also tends to be shorter, since most length in tea descriptions is adjectives. The practical use of this page is not to catch anyone out but to find sellers whose descriptions can be relied on, because a seller whose notes match your cups is worth far more over time than any single tea they sell. One more marker: good copy tends to say what a tea is not for. A description that mentions the tea is assertive, that it does not suit milk, that it needs cooler water than most people use, or that it will disappoint anyone expecting a different style, is doing something no marketing instinct would suggest. Sellers who write that way are managing expectations rather than maximising a single sale, which is the behaviour worth finding and keeping.