Ideal Tea Sample Sizes: How Small, How Large?

This post explores the question of what the ideal sample size is to offer to a customer. Hopefully, it will be useful both to potential shoppers as well as to tea companies.

Pictured here are some different samples I have received recently:



Some samples also arrive in tins, although these are not pictured. In a later post I plan to talk more about the type of containers used for samples, but for now, I want to focus on one thing: the size of the sample. It is evident from the picture above that there is a fair difference in size of different samples. Keep in mind, the size difference can be even larger than the picture suggests, because different amounts of leaf occupy different amounts of space. The brown package contains a tiny amount of loosely-packed oolong, whereas the tiny vacuum pack in the back (which weighs much more) contains a much larger amount of tightly-rolled oolong.

Why are samples useful?

If you are a business, the value of offering samples is immense. In case it's not glaringly obvious, offering small sample sizes of each of your teas is a way to help your customers to discover which teas they like, while minimizing the risk of the customer making big purchases that they are unhappy with. The last thing you want is a customer to sink a large amount of money into a purchase that they find out that they do not enjoy. If, on the other hand, the customer purchases several samples and does not like one of them, the loss is relatively small, and the customer has gained useful information.

What is an ideal sample size?

In my opinion, the ideal sample size is small enough that there is not much waste if the customer does not like the tea and large enough to try the tea several times and experiment with brewing.

I have seen sample sizes ranging from 2 grams to 1 ounce (a little over 28 grams). 2 grams is, in my opinion, much too small, as it is only enough to brew a single cup of tea, Western-style. Such a small sample size does not allow for repeated sampling and thus does not allow for any experimentation with brewing. Gong fu brewing, of course, is out of the question.

28 grams, on the other hand, is too big. Fortunately, I have lucked out in my purchases, and all 1-ounce samples I have ordered have been quite enjoyable to me. Sometimes it can take me time to acquire a taste for a tea, but in most cases, if I've brewed a tea three or more times, over a week or more, and I still fail to appreciate it, I probably am not going to like it at all, and the remainder of the sample is wasted unless I can find someone else who likes it.

I think 15 grams, or a little over half an ounce, is a sweet spot for me, in terms of sample size. This allows for 6 or more Western-style brewings, or for 1-2 Gong Fu brewings, with leaf left over if only done once. Being able to experiment with different styles of brewing helps me to really understand the tea.

Sample Pricing:

The size of tea samples is closely related to pricing. For inexpensive teas, especially with smaller samples, the cost of packing and labelling the sample is probably going to be larger than the cost of the tea itself.

For pricey teas and larger samples, the cost of the tea becomes significant. This phenomenon is very clearly evident in the catalog of Upton Tea Imports, which has a minimum sample size of $1 for 15 grams, and many teas with this price point, but also many teas which go much higher, including for smaller samples (the priciest I've seen from them was $8 for 2 grams).

My recommendation to companies is to price your samples as low as you can without losing money or undercutting the price of the next-largest quantity after the sample. Why? Samples are a great way to bring in new customers, and they prevent existing customers from ending up with teas they are not happy with. You might say: "But what about people who just like sampling teas...like you, Alex? Won't they put us out of business?" First of all, I said as low as you can without losing money. But I also want to point out that the people, like me, who order obscene numbers of samples and then never order those teas again, are the people who really think about tea. I may never re-order the vast majority of teas I sample, but I write about each one of them online, and often talk about them with my friends. By catering to the sampling crowd, you get free advertisement.

What do you think?

If you are a tea drinker, what is your ideal sample size when you are looking to try new teas? How often do you order samples, and how big a factor is sample size in choosing whether or not to buy from a company?

And if you work for or own a tea company, how do you determine the sample size to offer? And how do you set the price?

Babelcarp: A Website For Translating Chinese Tea Terminology

Today I want to introduce a resource that I have been using for quite some time, and that was very helpful in researching material for RateTea: this is Babelcarp: A Chinese Tea Lexicon, a website with an extensive database of tea terminology. Babelcarp is run by Lew Perin, who is available on twitter under the handle babelcarp.



What's in the name?

Babelcarp is a play on the name babelfish. The babel fish was created in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams, and came to life as Babelfish, an online automated language translator, which was run by Altavista back in the day, and is now run by Yahoo. Babel is an obvious reference to the Tower of Babel, well-known from the biblical story. Carp, on the other hand, are a diverse group of freshwater fish native to Europe and Asia; they are important in China; cultivated carp originated in China, so the carp is a suitable symbol of a Chinese translator. The word carp also means to complain or find fault--which is also relevant here, as using babelcarp can help you to become more critical of some of the misuse of Chinese tea terms that is common on the web and elsewhere in Western society.

Why use babelcarp?

Babelcarp is an exhaustive resource that goes very deep into Chinese tea production and culture. It's somewhere between a dictionary and encyclopedia...almost like a glossary specifically oriented for Chinese tea enthusiasts. To give you an example of how deep it goes, there is an entry on chaxiaoluyechan (Cha2 Xiao3 Lu4 Ye4 Chan2) = (茶小绿叶蝉 or 茶小緑葉), which is a leaf-hopper insect that is responsible for the unique flavor of Bai Hao Oolong.

Another feature I really like about babelcarp is that it provides the tones to pronounce the names in Mandarin (denoted by the numbers after the romanized syllables), and lists both simplified and traditional Chinese characters. Having both is important, as mainland China uses simplified characters, and Taiwan and many older Chinese communities in other countries use the traditional characters.

Visit babelcarp for yourself, type some terms into it, and see for yourself how useful it is! If you write about tea online, especially Chinese tea, you will likely find it an unparalleled resource. It's also good site to bookmark or remember if you regularly need to translate Chinese tea terminology. And hopefully, after this post, you'll easily remember the name.

Downtime, Tea, Birding, and Warblers

The term downtime or down time has two uses. In computing and information technology, or when referring to any sort of technology or machines, downtime refers to the time on which a system or machine is down or out of operation. In human terms, however, downtime can refer to a period of rest or relaxation. I hesitate to use the term "non-productive" because I find rest to be of paramount importance in productivity. In fact, one of the things I most like about drinking tea is that the time to make and then drink tea provides a break. Even if you drink tea at a desk, while working on other things, the act of pausing to take a sip provides a microbreak; these tiny breaks can reduce the risk of work-related injury, as well as enhancing your concentration and focus.

Today, however, I took more than a microbreak. After starting work fairly early, the servers that RateTea and a number of other websites that I run are hosted on experienced some downtime. While this was slightly annoying, the problem was fixed relatively quickly. During this time, however, I was unable to do the work I wanted to do. Given that it is still during the peak warbler migration season, I headed outside to Woodlands Cemetery to do some birdwatching.



Unfortunately, I did not have my camera on me; the above pictures are all pictures I have taken, of warblers, at various times. Today I saw a black-throated blue warbler, pictured upper-right, and a northern parula, pictured lower-left, and a black-and-white warbler, pictured top left. The other bird pictured here, yellow-rumped warbler, I did not see today (they tend to arrive in large numbers in a few weeks), but I also saw a chestnut-sided warbler, pine warbler, bay-breasted warbler, magnolia warbler, and American redstart. All in all, I saw 8 species of warbler and 23 total species of birds. Given that this was just a casual walk around an urban cemetery, and not a planned trip where I tried to see as many birds as possible, I find this amount of biodiversity staggering.

When I returned, the servers were back up. This was down time for me, but I was still working in a sense. I systematically gathered data on what birds I saw, and entered the data into eBird, which is a joint effort of the Audubon Society and Cornell Lab of Ornithology. eBird solicits data from casual volunteers as well as scientists and people conducting systematic bird surveys, and collects it into one master database, a lot like I collect data on tea into the master database at RateTea. If you birdwatch, eBird is an invaluable resource, but even if you just find wild birds interesting and want to learn more about them, I would also recommend checking out this site.

Warblers, Other Birds and Tea?

What do warblers, or birds in general, have to do with tea? I've noticed that a number of tea bloggers write about birds from time to time, and I've noticed that people who are interested in wild birds tend to be more likely to be interested in tea, and vice versa. Why? Often, I find tea bloggers mention birds when they mention changes in seasons, as the changes in which birds are present and in the birds' songs and behavior marks the changing of seasons.

But I also find that birds and tea actually have some more things in common, possibly because they are both organic or natural, dealing with living organisms: they both have a similar type of diversity. And both birding and tea appreciation involve honing one's perception. With tea, it's mainly smell and taste, and with birds, it's sight and hearing, that one develops. When one starts drinking tea, it's pretty easy to see and taste the difference between black tea and green tea. When starting to watch birds, it is also pretty easy to tell a crow from a sparrow.

The warblers, on the other hand, are often among the most challenging birds to identify. Many of them only arrive during a brief 3-week window of migration, once in the spring, and again in the fall. A large number of warblers have different plumage in different seasons, and have different male and female plumage. Furthermore, they're tiny, and most of them move very quickly; many of them tend to spend most of their time high in trees, where they are often backlit or hidden by branches or foliage. Learning to identify these birds is a lot like learning the differences between one tea garden and another, or being able to just look at a steeped oolong leaf and know what cultivar it came from. Birding and tea are both areas where one can continually learn more, developing greater skill and greater nuance in perception.

How about you?

Do you value down time? Have you ever experienced server downtime? Do you think one of the most valuable aspects of tea is way it provides a restful break? Do you pay attention at all to wild birds? Have you ever been birdwatching, had a bird feeder, and you ever heard of eBird?

Let me know!

Milestones: Happy Birthday RateTea

Happy Birthday to RateTea:

This past monday, the 19th, marks the 2-year anniversary of RateTea. This is a rather exciting milestone for me, and I feel rather silly having missed it.

Some of the biggest accomplishments related to RateTea lately involve a series of subtle and a few not-so-subtle changes to the visual design of the site, which I am hoping to continue, with the help of Sylvia, who is now working with RateTea on both the look and feel of the site, and as an editor. These changes include making a professional logo so that the site can have a consistent presence across the web, and printing business cards with the logo. And of course, attending World Tea East was also an important milestone.

My 500th Review:

Yesterday marked my 500th review on the site, which was a review of Maya Tea's Tulsi or Holy Basil. I've become quite a fan of this herb, having sampled 5 commercial blends of it. It is relatively tough to find 5 different commercially-available sources of Tulsi, although I currently have only 6 different sources listed on RateTea's page on Tulsi. I also have had tulsi grown myself...both fresh and dried...so add 2 more to that mix.

I find it interesting that my 500th review wasn't actually tea. Of those reviews, 92 of them are of herbal teas. I certainly am very interested in herbal teas and one of the things that I want to do is to convince people that just about any plant can be as interesting as tea, if you put as much effort into carefully cultivating it, and then appreciating it. But of course, most of my reviews are about tea--and pure teas, not flavored ones (276) so this is still where my focus is.

Happy first day of fall!

Another interesting milestone is the changing of the seasons; today is officially the first day of fall. I began the day today with a cup of Caykur's Earl Grey...this is a tea produced in Turkey, and the brand, Çaykur, is fully-owned by the Turkish government. This particular tea, although broken-leaf, was quite good, especially for its very low price. I hope to write more about Turkish tea, as the tea itself, and the economics of it, are both rather interesting topics.

But, for now, I must conclude this post...I have a busy day ahead of me, and it is raining. (I love rain.)

Food for thought:

What are some of your recent milestones in tea?

Facebook Pages of Tea Bloggers & Tea Companies

Many of us are members of Facebook, and we regularly see facebook pages that we can "like". It has come to my attention though that, outside of people who actually run pages, a lot of people do not know or reflect much on the purpose or uses of these pages, and the effects or results that "liking" a page has.

This post is about how I think about these pages, and it also highlights some relevant tea-related pages. If you use facebook at all, you may find this post illuminating. And, if you are one of the readers of this blog who own or runs a small business, website, or even a blog, you will hopefully find a little useful business advice hidden in here as well.



Image courtesy of Fasticon.

What is the point of a page?

Businesses use pages for promotional purposes, and for managing their online presence. A page provides a "public face" for the business. Businesses that think of facebook pages strictly as a marketing vehicle are missing one of the primary benefits of having such a page: the page allows a business to receive feedback from customers and the general public, and interact with these people in a casual manner. Which leads into the next point:

For individuals running websites, pages can separate work relationships from personal ones:

I sometimes worry that I offend some people because I do not always add people back on facebook, when I receive friend requests from people I have business relationships with. Although I have added a number of tea people to my facebook, I do not always do so as a general rule. This is nothing personal, I just don't want to end up with more than the obscene number of people on my friends list, and I also want to keep some degree of separation between the friends I know face-to-face, who know much about my personal life, and the people I just know in the context of business, work, or blogging about tea, who do not and may not want to know these things.

Having a page for your blog or business, even if you are just one person, can help to maintain this separation. And then, you are still free (as I often do) to add individual people on facebook if you want to do so.

What you "like" influences the world:

Although it seems like such a casual think, "liking" a page influences the word in a small way. For one, it subscribes you to that page's posts, which will place them in your feed. But also, you are now counted in the supporters of that page, which will be displayed both on your profile and on the page itself.

When a page has more supporters, it becomes more influential, both because it has a greater ability to distribute information, and because with additional fans comes brand recognition and legitimacy. For a business, likes or fans have a tangible cash value, and Facebook capitalizes on this fact by making money from organizations advertising to receive more fans.

Casually or carelessly liking pages enables you to be counted in the support of a business or organization. Think carefully before liking a page: do you want to support this business, website, blog, or organization?

I recommend being careful about liking, but also being generous with it. I like lots of pages...I want to support my friends, and any business that I come into contact with that I think is a good, honest business with a mission I support, and organizations working for causes I support.

Some Tea Pages:

In case you want some tea pages to like, I have a few recommendations. This is by no means a comprehensive listing:

• RateTea's Facebook Page - I run this page; it mostly posts updates and highlights random pages from the site; the material here is generally NOT the same as the twitter account, and I tend to post less often.


• Life in Teacup, the page for the blog and tea company run by Gingko Seto, focusing on Chinese teas. This is a fantastic blog, and a fantastic company, if you are not currently aware of it.


• World of Tea, a blog run by Tony Gebely; note, there is a separate page for Chicago Tea Garden.


• Tea For Me Please - The page for the Nicole's blog Tea For Me Please.


• Upton Tea Imports' Page - I could not possibly list all tea company pages, but I do want to list my favorite one. I particularly like how Upton uses facebook, highlighting new teas and interacting with fans/customers as well.


• Adagio Teas' page - this page is a little more fun and off-the-wall than the average facebook page, and is also worth checking out.

Apologies for the pages I inevitably missed...if you are listed in my blog's sidebar, or regularly read this blog, have an active facebook page, and want to be listed, please comment or tweet at me, and I will be glad to get your page listed as well!

There Is No Should

In this post, I want to highlight a particularly nasty word that sneaks into our vocabulary, and that, unfortunately, is deeply embedded in our culture. This is the word should. The essence of the word "should" is one person telling another person what to do. Should says: do it this way, the right way, or else you're doing it wrong. Should passes judgment, but without providing information.



The word should appears all over the place in tea culture:

• You should brew this tea with water at such-and-such temperature.
• You should try this tea, because it's so good.
• You should store your tea this way.
• You should look for this quality or that when buying tea.
• You should use this brewing vessel for brewing this type of tea.
• ...and of course, the infamous: you should not do X, Y, Z, or W.

...and the list goes on. First of all, I want to own up to the fact that I'm guilty of making some of these statements, both in my speech and my writing. My project to eliminate the word should is a work-in-progress, which I will get to below. But that said, I want to explain why I think these recommendations are problematic.

What's wrong with the word should?

Some statements are highly subjective. Take the statement: "You should try this tea, because it's so good." Although in some cases there is loose consensus about the relative quality of teas among certain small groups of people, teas are not universally "good" or "bad"...these are subjective statements. And yes, I have some objective data to back this statement up with a very strong argument.

On RateTea, I have programmed a matching system that allows users to compare their tastes in tea with each other, a lot like the way online dating sites calculate match percentages for compatibility of potential romantic partners. If you have rated enough teas in common with other users, you will be able to utilize this feature by visiting your profile or the profile of other users. What is my highest similarity with another user on RateTea? This would be 67%, with Marlena of Tea for Today, followed by 65% for the user MimiG; the next closest matches are in the 50%'s. 67% means that, if each of us try two teas, we tend to prefer the same tea only 67% of the time. And this is with the user on the site who has the closest match to my tastes.

Tastes are diverse! When you say "you should try/buy/drink this tea", you might be wrong. A safer statement to make would be: "I really love this tea, it is one of my favorites.", or if you really feel that it's likely the person would like it, say: "Based on what I know you like, I think you might really like this tea." -- and then leave the person to make their own decision, without telling them what they should or shouldn't do.

My own personal battle with should:

When the season of lent comes around, I often have tried out giving up various things, inspired by others around me doing the same. Usually, my friends seem to give up foods, and sometimes people give up Facebook, or some other piece of technology. This past lent, I tried giving up the word "should". I was inspired to do so by an observation I made about my own psyche, that I had an internal dialogue that was often based on what I should or shouldn't do, and also based on what other people should or shouldn't do.

When I used the word should on myself, I would often feel guilty when I didn't do things that I had told myself I "should" do. I also found that using the word should on myself did not actually provide any additional motivation for me to do (or not do) certain things.

When I used the word should on others, I would often feel angry or frustrated when other people did not act the way I felt that they "should". I also found that telling people that they "should" do something never motivated anyone do to what I wanted. I often found that the word made other people resistant and closed-off.

Replacing the word should:

Getting rid of the word should proved to be a very difficult task. It took much longer than the season of lent to work on. I enlisted the help of numerous friends and asked them to call me out whenever I used the word. I found that I was using it incessantly, not just in my head, but out loud...especially when I was part of a group that was deciding what to do: "Should we do this, should we do that?" But I quickly developed ways to reword things without using this word, and I found that these other ways of wording things had the benefit of greatly improved specificity, and clarification of what I was trying to communicate:

• Sometimes we say "should" when we mean "want to". "I should eat now." might mean: "I want to eat now." In a group, asking: "Should we do this?" sometimes can be replaced by the clarifying question: "Do you want to do this?" or the statement: "I would like to do this." But by being more specific about our desires, and asking other people to clarify their own wants and desires, we gain more information and ultimately make it easier for everyone in the group to be happy. And when alone, using the language of "want" rather than "should", we get in touch with our own desires, and help meet our own needs and do what we really want instead of what we feel a vague obligation to do.
• Sometimes "should" implies something that might go wrong if the direction or instruction is not followed. Often, there is a specific reason for the need, and clarifying it makes the statement more powerful, and a better motivator. Instead of saying: "You should store your tea in airtight containers." you can say: "If you do not store your tea in airtight containers, the aroma can escape and the tea can lose much of its flavor." The second statement provides more information, and is actually more convincing or compelling in terms of motivating people to store their tea in airtight containers. But because the word "should" is not always associated with need, and is sometimes associated with subjective recommendations, it is often ignored when used to give advice...which leads into the next observation.
• Sometimes the word "should" is totally superfluous, and describes a vague sense of obligation that is an artifact of some belief or thought that really does not apply in our current situation. An example...it's 6:00...you feel like you "should" eat, out of habit, but you're not hungry. Maybe you ate a big, late lunch? Should you eat, if your body is telling you that you're full? Or, back to our earlier examples...you should brew this tea with 180 degree water. Really? I brewed it with boiling water, compared to steeping with 180 degree water, and I like it better with boiling water.

More resources:

If you liked what you read here, there are a number of good resources, blog posts, and articles on the web about the benefits of avoiding the use of the word should. One of my favorites is Tiny Buddha's How to Enjoy the Journey More by Eliminating the Word Should. There's another good post about should on The Unheard Word. I also found another very simple, but interesting take on the subject in a post titled Replace the word SHOULD with COULD (now only available on archive.org). I found all of these to be good resources for getting more perspective on this topic, and they are all relatively quick reads.

How about you?

Do you use the word should? Have you worked on eliminating or reducing your use of this word? Have you seen any positive results from avoiding the use of this word? Do you know of any good writings / online resources on the word should besides those I've found here? Let me know!

Gyokuro: How Does It Make You Feel?

This morning I am drinking gyokuro, or to be more specific, Organic Gyokuro from Upton Tea, which is incidentally made in China. This tea is interesting for me on several levels. For one, it's a Japanese style of tea, made in China. I'm certainly no gyokuro expert, and I can't really testify to its authenticity or being true to the style, but I will say that I think this is a pretty good tea. But in this post, I don't want to focus on the way this tea tastes, or the question of whether China can produce high-quality gyokuro, but rather, the way this style of tea makes me feel.

How does it make you feel?

I actually love questions like "How does it make you feel?", and I have an amusing story about it. When I was at Oberlin college, I had a math professor, Robert Young, who taught Linear Algebra (a subject I initially found both hard and boring) and he somehow made it seem poetic and dramatic. It got better when I took Advanced Calculus from the same professor. He would write a theorem on the board, and then stop and ask, in a very loud voice: "So, how does this make you feel?" On some level, it was hilarious...some people approach mathematics as a dry subject, logical, precise, emotionless. But to many mathematicians, it is not like this...it is more like art, poetry, or music...full of passion and emotion. Some theorems seem strange, often utterly ridiculous. Others seem really cool or exciting. Often, the exciting ones are ones that outline deep or useful connections between seemingly disparate branches of math or mathematical structures, so in a sense, our emotions can guide us towards deeper discoveries and understanding.

In mathematics, I found that asking the question: "How does this make me feel?" allowed me to tap into this hidden mental ability of intuition that I had...allowing me to guide my logic. I started seeing the logic as superfluous, the icing on the cake, or perhaps just a path through a jungle of symbols and equations, whereas underlying everything was a core idea, a sort of spiritual truth or destination, and it was emotion and intuition that allowed me to distill the essence of the truth, and find that path through the jungle.

Back to tea:

So, in short, I find that asking how something makes me feel is often a path to insight or truth. Why is this important with tea? Tea is something that we drink, it's a mixture of chemicals that we put in our body, and it affects our mind and body both through its chemistry and through the mental processes set in motion by our experience of drinking it. And it's important for us to reflect on how tea makes us feel because it may make us feel better, and it may make us feel worse. This feeling may depend on what tea we are drinking, and what state our bodies and minds are in to begin with.

It is important to ask this question because asking it allows us to take care of our bodies by giving our bodies what they need and avoiding things that may be harmful or stressful.

On Gyokuro:

Gyokuro is an interesting style of tea because it is one that I did not particularly like at first. I initially found it to be too vegetal for my tastes. But I paid attention to the way I felt after drinking it and I realized that I enjoy the way it makes me feel. It just seems to make me feel good, in a sort of centering way, a little bit like meditation does. I think this slowly started making me like it a bit more. I think I now like it at least as much as other styles of green tea, if not slightly more. I think this process of tasting and sampling, followed by reflection on how we feel is actually part of the process of forming acquired tastes.

What affects how gyokuro makes one feel? I have read in numerous sources that gyokuro is high in caffeine among teas, although I have not found a single source I truly trust on this matter, so as far as I'm concerned, this observation is still speculative. I have seen reliable sources, however, which say that gyokuro has about twice as much L-theanine as typical for tea. Theanine is not well understood, but it is known to interact with caffeine as well as to play some role in promoting relaxation. Does this explain gyokuro's positive, centering effects? Possibly. But it's hard to say for sure. All I can say with certainty is that I can try individual teas and find which ones I enjoy more...both in terms of their flavor and their effect on my mind and body.

How about you?

Do you gain insight into your life by asking yourself how various things make you feel, physically, or emotionally? Do you like gyokuro...the way it tastes, or the way it makes you feel? What teas make you feel the best?