How we review

The rules we hold ourselves to

These are commitments, not a description of a finished catalogue. A tea gets onto the shelf when it can meet them, and not before.

• Named facts over marketing words. We describe teas by origin, cultivar, harvest and net weight — the things you can verify — rather than vendor grades. Where a marketing term (like “ceremonial grade”) has no public definition, we say so and show what to look at instead.
• Japanese primary sources. Producer, growing-region and competition information is read in Japanese and cited in each article’s sources list.
• Per-gram, as published — not as calculated. Tin and bag sizes differ, so price per gram is the only honest comparison. Where a vendor publishes one, we print it beside the price. We don’t divide it out ourselves: pack sizes are often approximate (“about 30g”) and a figure we computed would carry the same authority as one the maker stands behind.
• Never a single storefront. Where more than one vendor sells a tea, we don’t list only one. We are not a shop front for any single seller, and no vendor can buy a place here.

Tasted vs spec-based

We only say “tasted” about a tea we have actually brewed and drunk. Anything else is labelled a “spec-based pick” — chosen on verifiable specifications (origin, cultivar, harvest, price per gram) without a tasting claim. If a page doesn’t say “tasted”, we haven’t tasted it.

Affiliate links, plainly

• Some buy links earn us a commission at no extra cost to you. They are marked rel="sponsored" and a one-line disclosure sits directly above every buy box.
• Commissions never decide what we recommend or where a vendor appears. Vendors cannot pay to be listed, ranked, or described differently.
• We don’t publish a price without the date it was checked (“as of”). If a figure can’t be dated, the page says so where the date would be, rather than letting a bare number pass as current. Prices and stock change — the vendor page is the live truth.

What we never do

• No health or medical claims — we describe tea, not cures.
• No invented ratings: pages carry no star ratings until a real, documented review operation exists.
• No AI-generated images of real products or real tea fields.
• No “cheapest” or “in stock” claims baked into static pages.