Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I'm a terribly fussy tea drinker and alas it must be just so or else. So mail order tea is a real risk even with a gazillion 5 star reviews. It tastes like stong tea that has been washed then pre-brewed. What is washing? You want to wash your tea if it is dirty. Or loaded with insects. Aka, just picked and then dried. Completely natural and unprocessed. Toss the tea leaves into a bowl of water, swish and pour off the water. Brew normally or.... Pre-brew You want to do a fast pre-brew to your tea if you want a quick and dirty way to lower the caffeine in the tea. Pour hot water over the tea and let sit for 10 - 30 seconds. Then toss the water and brew as usual. The caffeine soaks out faster than the flavor. Mostly. You lose the most aggressive flavors from the tea and that element of the tea that makes your throat scratchy. It makes a cheap tea *seem* closer to a high end tea only missing some of the most interesting bright flavors. Use at least 50% more leaves if you do this because the regular amount will taste weak. The high end teas are naturally less harsh and don't affect your throat but have strong, bright flavors. It is a desecration to pre-brew a high end tea. There has been a rash of companies "cleaning up" their tea. David's Tea is one and now Davidson's. Every single tea I tried at David's Tea was like this tea (I went to a tasting - totally lost count of how many tea's I tasted). Of course, I have I dunno how many of my own teas. With a little experimentation, I found I could duplicate the flavor with highly aggressive washing/prebrewing using the strongest, harshest teas. In fact, you NEED strong, harsh (and yes cheap) teas otherwise there is no flavor left. Why wouldn't you do this to a strong but excellent tea? Because, you can sell it for an even higher price to addicted tea drinkers. And the price of these "special" teas? Thru the roof. What do I think? It's probably cheap strong tea, heavily washed/prebrewed then the price jacked up beyond belief. Smoothing out the taste of the tea is trivial. But inexperienced tea drinkers don't know this. These companies are targeting newbies and their wallets. They compare their product with high end teas - focusing on the smoothness NOT the taste. Because it tastes washed out and missing all the bright top notes. They know an inexperienced tea drinker won't pay $200 per pound for a high end tea therefore it's a safe comparison. The inexperienced drinkers first reaction is "how smooth" instead of "Half the flavor notes are missing, I can't even tell this is an oolong. Why is this so smooth? It's too inexpensive to be this smooth naturally. Oh, no." Recommendation: Go to a top notch tea shop that carries lots of Asian teas and do a tasting. Ask the shop owners about David's Tea and Davidson's - bring a sample if you have it. Ask them to duplicate the flavor. Or try it at home with two bags of Lipton instead of one. P. S. Tea leaves make great compost.