RateTea: Rate and Review Teas

I have been an active member of RateBeer for years.  I credit RateBeer with helping me to become more interested in craft beer, and with sparking me to pay more attention to how food and drink tastes in general.

One morning, while drinking a cup of tea in Newark, Delaware, I had the thought that it would be really fun and useful to rate teas on the internet, the same way I rated beers.  I searched and searched, but I could not find any site that had such a feature.  Since I was experienced as a web programmer (at the time working on a project called Merit Exchange), I decided to take on the task of creating one myself.

And so RateTea was born!  The site grew from a small side-project into a large, extensive site with several administrators working on it.  It now takes a little less time to maintain but has continued to grow and thrive.

The tea industry in the United States is a rapidly growing, emerging industry.  Although there have always been a few die-hard enthusiasts for high-quality loose-leaf tea, tea has often taken a back burner to coffee in the culture of food and drink in the US.  But in recent years, this has begun to change.

It can be hard to know where to start if you want to get more into tea.  The supermarkets are full of boxes of tea bags, some of which are better than others.  But loose-leaf tea can be harder to find.

The best place to buy loose-leaf tea, for most Americans, is online.  But it can be hard to know which companies to trust.  I hope RateTea can guide people to make informed purchases both by providing reviews of individual teas from specific companies, but also by helping them to learn more about tea so that they are better able to discern high-quality tea from low-quality.

RateTea is a really extensive site.  Although the site is oriented towards tea reviews, even if you're not particularly interested in writing reviews, you will probably still find the site useful and interesting as a general tea-related reference.  Some of the highlights of the site include:

• Articles on each type of tea, called "styles of tea" on the site to distinguish between the style of a tea, and the region in which it is grown.
• Pages on each tea producing region, down to the level of individual Chinese provinces and counties, Japanese prefectures, and districts of India.
• Listings of all the mainstream brands and tea companies available in the U.S. and several other countries, including the UK and Canada, and hundreds of smaller and specialty tea companies as well.
• A database that can be searched by brand, style, and region.
• Articles about the health effects of tea, tea production, the tea industry, and sustainability issues relating to tea, all with an eye towards how you can inform your own purchasing and tea drinking.

I hope you find the site useful!

RateTea also has a facebook page!  You can like this page to receive updates on tea in your Facebook page.  I am selective about what I share in the feed, so you can be assured that liking this page will result in highly informational posts in your feed.