When you are just at the beginning of your tea journey and not yet a great tea expert, it can be quite difficult to choose the right tea from the seemingly never-ending selection… To make the choice a bit easier for you, we chose one tea from each of the categories from the Renegade shop that we think are the best to get you started.
Let's start with green tea
Some people associate green tea with an astringent or even a bitter taste – something that's healthy, but that doesn't necessarily taste good. You can easily avoid the bitterness of green tea by using cooler water: around 80°C-85°C is perfect. If you don’t have a thermometer, you can guess that the temperature is about right when you can comfortably hold your hand over the water.
When brewed correctly, green tea can be very fresh, gentle, and, in the case of Georgian teas, even naturally sweet. From our selection, Green Velvet would be a great choice to get started with green teas - it's really smooth and soft! Even if you forget the leaves and brew it longer than you should, it doesn't get bitter.
Black tea – beloved by many
But, also feared... For many years, the green tea lobbyists have somehow given the impression that black tea is bitter, astringent and not as good for your health as green tea. We dedicated a separate blog post for that topic which you can read HERE.
If you rarely drink black tea or if your past experience was rather negative, we suggest starting with a smoother black tea from the start of the season such as Evening Lilac. This is a smooth and flowery black tea from our spring production. Most of the other Renegade Tea Estate black teas are typical to Georgian teas – rather smooth, sweet and fruity.
The best of both worlds – oolong tea
Somewhere halfway between the fresh taste of green teas and more full-bodied taste of black teas, there are oolongs. A lot of people don’t know much about oolongs, but from our own experience, this is also a world definitely worth exploring. Oolongs can vary from almost green tea to something closer to black tea and everything in between. To get the first peek into this category, we’d recommend Miss Ohh Long - a perfectly balanced oolong with the silky nature of black tea and the freshness of green tea.
Every tea package comes with brewing instructions so that you can get the best out of all your teas. In the end, every person has their own taste preferences and you can always modify the instructions accordingly - using hotter or colder water, adding less or more tea leaves.
How to make loose leaf tea – for beginners
Brewing loose leaf tea shouldn't be a hassle. A good tea infuser is the perfect helper when it comes to making a cup of tea - you can use the infuser straight in your favourite mug and use the same leaves for many infusions. Teaware is also a vast category – you can find everything from intricate teapots to gaiwan sets. Again, it's worth exploring to find the style that you like best – there's no right or wrong way to brew your tea.
What's the easiest way to choose your tea?
Rather than order teas one by one, we've made it easier for you to try all the range of flavours that can be coaxed out of the humble tea leaf. Our taster set has the full range of teas that we made in the respective season. Alternatively, if you already know whether you prefer lighter or darker teas, you can try the sets we put together here.
Whatever you choose, keep in mind, that even though teas outside of the supermarket may come off as super fancy and something suitable only for the great tea masters, it's actually entirely up to you which teas you prefer. Don't be afraid to just try teas out and be a bit of a renegade in this sense! We wish you happy tasting!
