TeaVivre Tea Reviews

With hundreds of tea companies that sell loose-leaf tea, it can be hard to locate the ones that offer top-quality tea.  Through my work on RateTea, I receive dozens of requests from startup companies wanting to be listed on the site, many of them wanting to offer me samples.  TeaVivre stood out among these hundreds of companies.

TeaVivre is one of several of a new type of tea company, Chinese companies that direct-ship from China.  (One of my favorite other companies along these lines is Yunnan Sourcing, which specializes in teas from Yunnan province.)  The advantage of this model is freshness, quality, and price: TeaVivre is closer to the producers, and is thus able to offer both superior quality control and lower prices.  The disadvantage is shipping costs.

Of course, if you're a fan of British-style teas, TeaVivre may not be for you.  This company specializes in Chinese teas, and while it does carry a few strong black teas that may please lovers of teas from the English tradition, this area is not its focal point.  But for people who are a fan of Chinese teas, including green, black, white, and oolong, TeaVivre is a

TeaVivre's website is well-organized and easy to use.  Some of my favorite aspects of the site:

• The tea is organized by category; it's easy to locate green teas, black teas, oolong teas, and the like.
• There are clear photographs of the loose-leaf tea, the brewed cup of tea, and the spent leaves after brewing.  I find these helpful to assess quality.  Having sampled over 20 teas from the company, I can say that the pictures on the website very closely match what the tea actually looks like.
• The website provides extensive information on each tea, often down to the level of individual towns and counties of production, which goes much deeper than the level of detail which most tea companies provide.
• TeaVivre describes each tea's flavor, aroma, and other characteristics, and gives recommendations for brewing.  I found the descriptions to be quite accurate, about as accurate as one can get, given that different people can perceive tastes and smells in very different ways.

The website also contains information on the health benefits of tea, but I found that this information was not as reliable as that found on some other sites.

One of the things that I think makes TeaVivre an outstanding company to buy from, especially for first-time buyers, is that their teas are true to the styles or types of teas that they sell.  What I mean by this is that if you order a particular type of tea, like a named variety like Keemun black tea or Dragon Well green tea, TeaVivre's tea will tend to taste like a typical example of this type of tea.

This makes the company particularly attractive to buy from from people who are familiar with Chinese teas, but who have never ordered from this particular company.

If you aren't as familiar with Chinese teas, but want to get more into them, or if you're still wanting to test the waters before you make a larger purchase, TeaVivre offers small sample sizes of each of their products.  You can also find numerous reviews of TeaVivre's teas on RateTea.

If I had to point to a single tea from TeaVivre that seems to be popular, it would be the Bailin Gongfu black tea.  On RateTea, this tea currently holds the highest percentile of teas from this company, but perhaps more importantly, I have also seen a near consensus among tea bloggers and reviewers both on RateTea and other sites that this tea is a relatively straightforward and accessible tea.  While some people like it more than others, no one seems to dislike it.  It has favorable reviews on Tea For Me Please.

My personal favorites, however, are their Keemun Grade 1, a classic Keemun, and Xin Yang Mao Jian, a rather brisk green tea.  These are both lower-priced teas from this company, and while their higher-grade counterparts are certainly smoother, I thought they offered outstanding value.