How To Store Tea

Knowing How to Store Tea Properly ...

So, you've gone to great lengths to find a great tea and you've spent two to five times what it would cost to get an ordinary everyday tea from the grocery store. How to store tea, good quality tea, is now more important because you want to enjoy that expensive blend as if it had just been freshly picked.

But, even fine teas can go stale, like any agricultural product.

In fact, good quality or finer teas often have fewer or no artificial preservatives and can decay quicker as a result. But knowing how to keep your tea stored properly can make it last as long as a year.

A proper tea caddy, tin or chest is your best defense against the ageing and oxidizing effects of air and light. You can find them in different materials and in hundreds of stylish designs. But the two chief characteristics they need to have are to be airtight and impervious to light.

Why and How to Store Tea Away from Light

Ordinary sunlight and indoor lighting both have an energetic Ultra Violet component.

That energetic light wave can break down the molecules in your tea, stripping away color and flavor over time. Keeping your teas in the dark may not allow you to enjoy a nice display of the multi-colored tea leaves from different tea growing areas of the world. But it is definitely the preferred way of how to store tea, in order to preserve the rich flavors and appearance of a good brew.

Why and How to Store Tea Away from Air

Air contains oxygen, which readily combines with a wide variety of organic molecules, altering them in subtle ways. Leave your tea exposed to air and the result will rarely be an enhancement of the flavor in your tea leaves. The oxidation process breaks apart molecules and will change your tea leaves flavor profile.

But air contains more than just oxygen. It also carries odors from foods, air pollutants like hydrogen sulfide (a component of smog) and other compounds. Those readily find their way into your water, into your expensive tea leaves and even tea bags. Knowing how to store tea properly will help keep air out during extended periods of storage and reduce those chemical reactions to a minimum.

Changes will still happen, on a very small scale, when your tea caddy, tin or chest is opened, but not enough to cause a large enough change that you might detect.

Air also contains moisture, water molecules that float around. Higher humidity climates have more, desert climates have relatively less, but all except the most extreme environments have some water borne pollutants.

Moist air carries odors, it enhances the effects of oxidation and can itself produce chemical changes. It can also help form an environment that is friendly to the growth of mold and other organisms that can ruin your good quality tea leaves.

So, Storing Tea Properly Means ...

Keeping the interior of your tea caddy, tin or chest moisture tight and completely dry. This helps your tea leaves retain the optimum tea flavor. The flavor you paid so much for.

Enhance this means of how to store tea, by adding a small amount of desiccant, to help absorb any moisture that does enter your airtight tea caddy, tin or chest when you open it. An old method of doing this was to add a teaspoonful of dry rice grains to your caddy. It's thought the rice absorbs moisture quicker than the tea leaves and also any moisture that evaporates from the leaves themselves.

And; since tea leaves will evaporate a little moisture over a certain amount of time, it's also best to keep each type or blend of tea separate.

The flavor profile of your favorite oolong tea can be altered if it's exposed to the same air as a good rooiboos. Whether you use individual tea caddies, tins or a special type of container in which each cubical is closed off is a matter of convenience.