Elixir Fine Tea

A somewhat frequent question I get is “how should I store my tea?” While you hear lots of variations on the “best” way to store tea (with additional variations based on what type of tea), for most teas it boils down to four simple principles.

1) Avoid Evil #1: Moisture. This is a fairly basic one. Keep your tea away from moisture. Moisture is good when you want to steep your tea, but for storage, moisture is bad. Keep it away from places that tend to be damp or steamy. For example, next to the shower isn’t the greatest place, nor is right above the stove when you’re boiling pasta.

2) Avoid Evil #2: Extreme Temperature. Excessive heat isn’t so hot (thus above the stove is doubly bad). And in many cases, excessive cold isn’t cool either. Don’t freeze your tea–especially if it’s been open to the regular air. You know how that condensation thing works? Well, that happens on the tea if you’ve got warm air in the bag and you cool it down in the fridge of freezer…then you’ve got Evil #1 going on.

3) Avoid Evil #3: Bright Light. This can tie in to the heat thing from #2, but light itself can affect how long a tea will retain flavour. Glass jars next to the kitchen window may look pretty, but it’s not a good idea if you want to actually drink your tea more than a couple of weeks from now. Your tea should not be more enlightened than you - it’s okay for some things to be kept in the dark.

4) Avoid Evil #4: Air Flow. Nobody likes sitting in a draft, and tea’s no different. With the exception of pu-erh tea, which needs access to a little bit of air to properly age, you pretty much want to seal up the tea so there’s no wicked winds wafting away the wonderful flavours of your tea.
Solution: Use some kind of opaque packaging that you can seal and reseal reasonably well (which means no “breathing” materials like paper or cloth unless you’re storing pu-erh). Put it in a closet, drawer, shelf, or cabinet where there isn’t much temperature fluctuation. I’ve included a photograph of some tea storage containers I use. I keep them in a drawer that only comes open when I want to brew some tea.

Source: Michael Coffey