By John Rice, General Manager

In the ten plus years The Tea Table has been in business, tea has been steadily becoming more popular. The positive side is that there are more and more teas available. One of the down sides is that the quality of teas can, in general, steadily decline. While we are constantly finding fabulous new teas, the percentage of ones we reject keeps going up. In fact, we recently received a box of around 50 samples from a well known tea seller and distributor, and after sampling dozens of them, we pretty much gave up after finding only one tea we felt might be good enough for us to sell.

After all, tea is an agricultural product. It isn’t simply manufactured. So, as popularity and demand increase, quality can tend to decrease. Through all of this, the priority at The Tea Table continues to be providing the highest quality teas possible while maintaining reasonable prices. Sometimes the quality of a certain tea will deteriorate and we have no choice but to discontinue it. We will always seek out a replacement, and we constantly look for improved teas to offer, but we will not continue to sell a tea that no longer meets our standards. If you find one of your favorite teas is suddenly not available anymore, you can always ask through our online form and find out if a replacement is on the way. Be patient. It can sometimes take quite a while to find a replacement as good as the previous tea. As an option, we can often suggest one (or several) alternatives. Frequently, this leads to a tea you like even more than the one you wanted to replace.