Frequently Asked Questions

Definitely! Adding herbs to your tea will give it different flavors and benefits. Here’s how you would do it.

First, craft a basic black or green tea. Once it has been dried, you would then blend it with your herbs of choice. The ratio of tea-base to herb add-in will vary based on the flavor strength of the herbs. So it could be anywhere from a one-to-one ratio, to four parts tea with one part herbs.

I encourage you to experiment. One way to do this is to “micro-batch” your blending. Try making a single pot of your tea-herb blend and measure in teaspoons to determine the best ratio. You may find that dried herbs are more potent than fresh herbs. You may find that mint is more potent than most flowers. Let us know what works best for you!

There’s a good chance you have all the equipment you’ll need. Tea can be crafted using the basic tools in your kitchen. When I craft a green or black tea, I’ll simply use a cookie / baking sheet, a cooling rack and sometimes a vegetable / rice steamer, or wok / frying pan. Pretty simple actually.

Flavored tea uses a green or black tea as its base, then rolls them with a flavoring add-in. This add-in could be herbs, botanicals, dried flowers, or even essential oils. In the case of jasmine, it’s often jasmine oil (the flowers are usually for show since they don’t carry much flavor when dried). In the case of earl grey, it’s often oil of bergamot.

We don’t currently provide flavoring add-ins, but would love to in the future. Keep your eyes peeled.

All traditional tea will have some caffeine in it. The amount in a cup of your tea when steeped can be anywhere from 12 to 60 mg (I’ve even heard of it higher). This is still less than a cup of coffee, and the effects of caffeine are actually balanced out by tea’s L-theanine content. But that’s another story.

The amount of caffeine in your tea is determined by the steeping temperature, steeping time, and how many times you’ve steeped it. Caffeine dissolves in boiling water far more easily than at lower temperatures. This is why most folks assume black tea has more caffeine. Whereas green tea is usually steeped at a lower temperature, and the caffeine dissolves more slowly.

OK I lied, there are two other variables that determine caffeine content. The age of the tea (over time caffeine degrades), and its terroir. Terroir is probably the reason why there’s such a measured range of caffeine in tea. Certain varietals of the plant will naturally produce more caffeine than others. Addtionally when it’s harvested and the growing conditions will play a further role.

Semantics. You’re probably thinking that it means we give you some basic tea like the one you would find in the grocery store, and tell you how long to steep it in hot water…maybe even sell you a tea pot to do it in.

That’s way far off from what we actually do.

All those traditional teas you see in the super market (green, black, etc) are actually created from the same plant. Mind blow, right?! The leaves of the camellia sinensis are harvested then processed, and the type of processing they go through determines what type of tea it is.

Well if you’ve ever brewed beer or baked bread, we imagine you enjoyed the process, and were proud to share what you created with your own two hands. Maybe show it off to friends and family. We’re helping you do the same with tea. We give you the leaves of the tea plant in its most basic form, and we teach you what to do with it. YOU decide what tea to make, YOU create a tea to share with friends and family.

Follow our blog, look around our site, visit us at an event and you can see what the leaves look like.

Beer is brewed and bread is baked. When we talk about how tea is made, we use the word “craft” since most folks think something entirely different when you say you’re “making” tea. It’s also a friendlier word than talking about manufacturing tea in your kitchen.

By raw leaves, we mean tea leaves in its most basic form. All tea comes from the leaves of the camellia sinensis. Once harvested they then go off to factories to be processed into black, green, oolong, and other traditional teas. So if you over-simplify the tea manufacturing process, it would be:

Step 1: grow leaves
Step 2: harvest leaves
Step 3: process leaves
Step 4: blend / flavor / grade as needed

Raw tea is simply the unprocessed leaves you get immediately after step 2. By supplying you with tea leaves at their most basic level, YOU can decide what kind of tea you would like to craft. Speaking of crafting tea…we have an FAQ on what we mean with that word too.

To make a basic tea, all you need is what we give you: a pouch of leaves from the camellia sinensis. All traditional tea is made from this one plant. Crazy, right?!

If you wish to experiment with different flavored teas, such as jasmine or early grey, you will need their respective flavor additions. In the case of Jasmine, it’s usually the essential oils of the jasmine flower, or dried flowers (although the dried flowers don’t have as much flavor). In the case of Early Grey, you would roll your base tea with oil of bergamot.

We don’t yet sell these oils, but plan to do so in the future to make your teawright’s journey easier.

We currently have recipes on the website for basic black tea and basic green tea. As we explore, research & test out new recipes, we will include them in our blog and site as well!

Click the links below to read about how to craft these teas:

• Basic Black Tea
• Basic Green Tea

The Boston Teawrights is a startup company. We began building the idea and our supplier relationships since 2012, and incorporated in 2013. Here’s to many happy, fruitful years to come!

The Boston Teawrights is based in the Boston area, here in the US. While our suppliers come from around the World, all of our operations are based here.

All traditional teas (technically, the only beverage that can be advertised simply as tea) come from the leaves of the Camellia Sinensis. That’s right, *all* teas. The difference between black, green & other tea is in how they are processed or crafted once harvested. These differences occur because of the different techniques used like steaming, wilting, oxidizing, rolling.

This answer focuses only on traditional tea, though. Tisanes or herbal teas do not come from the camellia sinensis and have to be advertised as ____ tea (where the blank is the name of the plant it comes from).

Our leaves are grown around the World. Depending on the time of year, we work with growers in Taiwan and New Zealand.

If you’ve ever brewed beer, made wine or baked bread, ask yourself why you did it. Many folks will do this because they love to involve themselves with the food & drinks they enjoy. They want to learn the art of their food, they want to learn the history of their food. Sometimes, folks simply want to create something they can proudly share with their friends and family. If that’s you, then that’s your answer.