While I’m in Taiwan I’ve been having tea a few times with Alex from Taiwan Tea Odyssey. In our conversations over random teas, obviously one of the topics that would come up is vendors. I haven’t really looked at any online vendors for quite some time – well, online vendors that are Western facing, anyway, since I have really no need to buy from any of them. Alex is much more familiar with them than I am. But since we talk about them, I end up on their websites to look at stuff. And my, things are bad.
Specifically, I’m talking about images. What shocked me is that, years and years after I first started buying tea online, in many ways vendors have regressed. I’m seeing people selling tea whose only photo for a tea is a slightly blurry, non-white-corrected shot of the loose leaves. No liquor shot, no wet leaves visible. Ok, I can sort of understand if the tea being sold is an older puerh, with very limited supply of maybe a couple cakes, and is expensive – the vendor may not have a ready sample to brew up to show buyers (although, if that’s the case, how would the vendor know it’s good to sell at the listed price?) But for loose leaf teas there’s really no excuse. It’s the cost of business to at least show the dry and wet leaves and the liquor in a white neutral and consistent style. You can add in your artistic shots, but at a minimum you need those three things.
When it was still alive, Taiwan Sourcing was pretty good about this, if I recall correctly. But so many vendors these days have inconsistent shooting styles (some evidently taken from auctions/suppliers of theirs) and only showing you dry leaves, often with white balance that are way off, and sometimes showing you wet leaves but more often than not showing you nothing at all. If there’s a liquor shot, it’s usually just some generic “teacup on a wooden desk” style, with no ability for the viewer to compare between different teas. That’s worthless.
It’s pretty obvious why you want shots of dry leaves – that shows you what you’re buying, presumably. Wet leaves, as any seasoned drinker would know, is useful to examine. It can often tell you things about the tea that dry leaves cannot – two teas that look very similar when dry can appear quite different when wet. For puerh, wet leaves give you clues about storage condition. For oolongs, it gives you information about oxidation and roasting, as well as general processing (hand picked, machine picked, etc). With no wet leaves, none of this information is available to the buyer. The only signal then is price and the often vague description of the vendor.
Liquor is also extremely important for obvious reasons, and for some reason many vendors seem to be foregoing this part of the sales pitch as well. I cannot understand why it has become acceptable in 2025 to sell teas without showing you a picture of what the liquor looks like when you brewed it. Ideally, this should be consistent – the liquor is, say, a standard cupping 3g in 5 minutes brew, or something like that. Only then can you actually compare between the ten varieties of oolongs that are being sold, for example, or to compare the storage condition of the puerh that is offered. Liquor shot at an angle using different teaware without colour correction is pretty much pointless – I can’t compare them. Does this add to the cost of doing business? I would like to think hardly at all – after all, the vendor listing the item should be trying the tea at some point, no? I would also like to think that better information would lead to more informed purchase decisions, and for those on the fence, they may feel more comfortable buying tea with those information available. In the day and age of 4k videos and lighting speed internet connections, how is it that some decent photos cannot be had? Tea drinkers, start asking your vendors to give you better product photos. You deserve better.
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