I was making my usual rounds on the internet researching green tea today, and I stumbled across this article on the NY Times website. It talks about a laboratory study by some researchers at the University of Strathclyde and their findings that green tea antioxidant (EGCG) has some pretty potent anti-carcinogenic properties. Pretty cool stuff.
Green tea can reduce skin cancer
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Here’s a question I get asked, and a question I see people on the internet asking: Where can I buy green tea? I think this question deserves a post devoted to it.
I think a good place to start is to tell you where I buy green tea. I buy my every day green tea from an asian market down in Hartford called Young’s. A good place to start looking is your local asian market if you’re new to buying green tea. Now that green tea is starting to become something people want to buy in the US, there are specialty tea stores popping up where you can buy green tea. Places like Teavana that are big chains, and small local owned stores. Personally I’m not a big fan of buying tea from those stores… I haven’t found any that don’t have overpriced low quality tea in fancy packaging. I’m sure there are a few exceptions, but generally the green tea you buy at those sorts of stores should be bought online. You can get the same teas in a higher quality and lower price.
At many asian markets (if you’re looking to buy Japanese green tea) they’ll have brands like maeda-en, which is my personal favorite. I haven’t generally found Chinese green teas in markets, but then there aren’t any specifically Chinese supermarkets around here that I know of. Maeda-en (or similar brands) will have bags of Sencha, Gemnaichai, Kukicha, or Bancha. I’ve tried most of the maeda-en teas, and they’re generally pretty good. That’s where I buy my everyday Sencha green tea, of which I consume a few pots a day normally.
So, if you’re looking to buy locally in a store, search for “Asian market” or “Asian grocery store” in google maps (add the closest city and your state after that). See what sort of stuff they have there. If you have questions about what you find there, feel free to shoot me an email or comment, and I’d be happy to try and help you out. So, in answer to our question “where can I buy green tea?”… try your local asian store.
I buy all of my special occasion and high quality teas online. I’ve looked around pretty extensively at online retailers (if you want you can check out my recommendations page, linked to in the bar above), and my personal favorite is Seven Cups at the moment.
The reason I buy green tea online is because, as I mentioned earlier, the stuff in specialty stores is generally not very good. I think the reason is because they’re generally catering to upper-middle class suburbanites who want to be sophisticated and are into novel things like green tea, but at the same time don’t know anything about buying real green tea. So, they can get away with selling fancily packaged lower grade tea with some cool name they came up with. I suppose I’m starting to sound condescending of my own demographic… so, I don’t mean diss the stores I’m talking about. They have their place. I guess. It’s not like they sell bad tea or anything, if it suits your fancy, it’s certainly much better than bagged teas you’ll find in a grocery store. I’m not disputing that. I just want to let you know there’s probably higher quality tea that you can buy for just as much money. That’s all.
So, with that out of the way, how does one start looking for where to buy green tea online? Well, a good place to start, as I mentioned a second ago, is my list of online retailers above. But certainly don’t feel limited to that. At the same time, it is pretty overwhelming trying to find somewhere to buy green tea online: quite a flood of people are starting to sell it. I would warn you that there are a lot of affiliate sites out there. If you see a link to something like Adagio or Teavanna, they’re probably affiliate links (meaning that if you go through the link and buy something the site that got you there gets a commission). So, they might be honest recommendations, or they might be ploys at making money. Kind of hit or miss… though after you’ve looked at a lot of sites like I have, you start to get a feel for whether a site is trying to make money through affiliates or not. So, it just takes a little (or a lot) of sorting through websites and lists of retailers. I’m sure you’ll come up with a plethora of them.
I’m sure by now you’ve noted that I have ads to the left. I try to pay for the upkeep of the site with those ads, but I don’t do any affiliate links. Just ftr.
So, where can you buy green tea online? In summary, either check out my list of retailers that sell green tea, or surf the interwebs with discernment and discretion. Cheers!
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