Should I sign up for a tea club?

Drinking whole flowers + the nature of tea subscriptions.

Leafhopper’s subscription sale

Before today’s scheduled entry: Leafhopper is approaching its first anniversary! This project is only possible through the support of paid subscribers, so I want to do something special for December.

Today through the end of 2024, any new paid subscription to Leafhopper will grant you a free subscription you can give to someone else. Sign up for a monthly plan and you’ll get a free 1-month subscription. Sign up for an annual plan and you’ll get a free 1-year subscription. Simply email me at max.falkowitz@gmail.com when you subscribe to tell me who should receive your gift. Then you and your tea friend can read articles together and gloat when I get something wrong.

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Devour these flowers

The tea: Whole flower teas, sold by The Qi. $28-36 for 9.

Some people are real sticklers about limiting the term “tea” to brews made from Camellia sinensis leaves, thus shunting herbs, flowers, and roots to the club of tisanes. I’m not so concerned. Language evolves through common use. If you’ve grown up drinking Greek mountain tea or pine needle tea and have called it that all your life, who am I to stop you? While there’s a lot more work to prepare tea leaves for consumption than, say, dried mint, producing dried mint for brewing is no cakewalk either. To me, herbal and flower teas have as much right to be called “tea” as a batch of citrus-spiked Earl Grey. So let’s talk about some enjoyable flower teas.

The Qi is a self-described wellness brand that specializes in whole flower teas. Open a packet with a single hefty dried rose or chrysanthemum blossom, put it in a cup, and steep with hot water. I appreciate the simplicity, and there’s strong visual appeal to watching flower petals shimmy as they brew, like a flamenco dancer taking a twirl. Truly good, interesting, and complex herbal teas are hard to come by. I’ve liked The Qi’s rose tea in the past and decided to taste their full selection of single flower brews.

What we don’t know about caffeine

All of The Qi’s flowers are grown organically, the company says, though only their chrysanthemum from Jiangxi is certified at the moment. This is common when dealing with small farms, as obtaining organic certification is expensive and logistically complicated. I’ll note that organic is not synonymous with “free from all pesticides.” That’s important when drinking flowers. However The Qi does note that all of their flowers are tested to comply with USDA National Organic Program standards.

With that in mind, here’s my take on all three flowers.

Shangri-La Rose: The tea that made me take notice of The Qi. The rose aroma is potent from the moment I tear open the package. The flavor is juicy and fruity, and develops a subtle tartness as the flower steeps, like a toned-down hibiscus. Not a gram of grandma in this pretty pink brew.

Blue Lotus: My first experience drinking this lovely flower, and I’m a new fan. I’m met with the aroma of tarragon and violet candies. There’s a yeasty, fresh-baked pastry quality that belies some earthy notes, too. It tastes softer than it smells, a kind of soothing blueberry with the texture of starchy pasta water. The violet flavor intensifies as the brew sits, forming a kind of floral broth. If the rose feels transporting, this lotus feels grounding.

Royal Chrysanthemum: Chrysanthemum tea can taste sweet to the point of cloying. This jellyfish-like flower is light and delicate with notes of hay. While the aroma is enticing, I want a stronger flavor to the brew. My least favorite bloom of the three. Perhaps The Qi’s smaller chrysanthemum flowers pack more of a punch.

At $3 to $4 for a flower, these blossoms are more expensive per cup than many of the teas I drink regularly. You don’t get the same re-steep value from flowers that you do from tea leaves. Still, I like the form factor, and the quality of the blue lotus and rose justify the cost of admission for me. There’s something elemental about watching a flower flit around a bowl. Put on some Jimi Hendrix and watch the show.

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Ask a Tea Person: Should I join a tea club?

Welcome back to of Ask a Tea Person, Leafhopper’s tea advice column. Check out previous editions here, and submit your own questions by emailing max.falkowitz@gmail.com with “Ask a Tea Person” in the subject line.

I wanted to ask if you had any recommendations for “tea clubs” — those subscription services where you pay a set fee and they mail you a few samples of different teas to try. On the one hand, it seems like a useful way to broaden my drinking horizons (I'm a relatively new drinker and still trying to figure out what's out there and what I like), but some of them seem more like a marketing gimmick than like a quality experience. Do you have any recommendations for ones that you think are particularly solid? — Brin S.

I blame it on Netflix.

Subscription services that bet on you forgetting to cancel are as old as infomercials, but I think the arrival of Netflix in 2007 broke something within us. It was $9 a month back then for all the DVDs you could watch—practically a rounding error. Fast forward 17 years and auto manufacturers are putting car features behind monthly paywalls. Good work, everyone!

I’ll admit, I advise pretty much every e-commerce company I work with to start some kind of subscription. As product, shipping, and advertising costs continue rising, recurring passive revenue is just too good to leave on the table. There’s a reason just about every tea company out there offers some kind of tea club now.

So tea clubs are good for tea sellers. But are they good for tea buyers? As with everything in tea, it depends who you’re buying from.