Best tea club to match your preferences
Art of Tea Club
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While coffee may be all the rage, if you want a more low-key beverage, tea is the way to go. Just like with coffee, though, there are things you can do to elevate your tea-drinking experience. You can find some of the great herbal, green, black and breakfast blends online. Tea subscriptions aren’t all that different from any other of our favorite food and drink clubs, but instead of sending meal kits, cuts of beef or wine, they’ll ship boxes of bagged and loose-leaf tea on your doorstep, so you can kick back with a cup of tea, right at home.
Of course, there are many tea club options out there. We’ve steeped ourselves in several top tea clubs to find the best for 2024, to help you pick the best subscriptions and monthly tea delivery services (for yourself or a loved one). We’ve tried all the tea clubs listed below to see what they do best, and help you figure out which one might be worth your money in 2024. All the tea subscriptions we recommend also make great gifts (just make sure you plug in the recipient’s address and not your own).Â
(More of a coffee drinker? We’ve tried the top coffee clubs too.)
Best tea clubs and subscriptions for 2024
If you’ve got an adventurous tea drinker on your shopping list, this is a loose-leaf tea monthly club to gift. My subscription contained several teas that made me say “Oooh, I wonder how that’ll be” or ” I didn’t know you could make tea taste like that.” Most of them did work very well, including a creme brulee oolong and pumpkin spice black tea.
Subscribers to this loose tea service can choose from a mixed tea subscription box, a black tea box, a green tea box and an herbal tea box. A new fresh and fragrant unique tea will be delivered monthly, bimonthly or quarterly.Â
Each fresh tea box comes with a curated selection of teas (14 grams of each) packaged with information about each of the different teas and enclosed in resealable bags. The teas will vary based on the season and trending flavors. You will also get reusable cotton tea filters with the first monthly subscription.Â
Pricing: A subscription for two half-ounce samples starts at $18 a month for a full year of subscription.Â
Atlas lets you customize your subscription a bit more. When signing up for this tea subscription box, you’ll log whether you want caffeinated, caffeine-free or a mix, and if you covet green tea, black tea or a combination. You also choose how many teas you’d like per month: one or two.
Atlas lives up to its name with elegant teas from some of the best tea-producing regions in the world including many in the East like Japan, Indonesia, Thailand, India and Nepal.Â
Just like the sister subscription Atlas Coffee Club, all these teas arrive with corresponding postcards that contain info about the region the tea hails from. I love that touch and can’t think of a more delightful thing to peruse while I’m sipping the stuff.
The baseline subscription for this service isn’t a massive amount of tea per delivery, so this is a perfect tea club for a moderate tea drinker or a tea lover who has a standard morning variety but likes to mix in a fun new herbal or oolong every once in a while.Â
Pricing: A subscription of one tea per month (about 15 cups) is $10 and two teas (30 cups) is $14. Sign-up is simple and you can cancel anytime.
Art of Tea has one of the more intense tea clubs to experience every tea type. To get a sense of your preferences, it’ll start you or the tea drinker you’re gifting with a nine-question tea profile quiz collecting information such as what time you drink tea, flavor likes and dislikes and even what sort of vacations you take (no, I don’t know why either).Â
From there, you’ll choose from five different tea subscription types: caffeine-free, classic, single-origin, explore and pyramid sachets. You’ll also select either a three-month, six-month and 12-month plan.
Each monthly tea box contained just one type of tea, chosen based on your quiz. I got four ounces of a warm masala chai in my first box and it was heaven on a cool Sunday afternoon. Turns out the algorithm works well — at least, so far.
Each month, between two and four ounces of tea will be shipped out with information to dive deeper into the wide world of tea. Teas are seasonally selected and you’ll get a new fresh tea or flavored teas each month.Â
Be aware that, depending on your tea club selection — single-origin, classic, tea bags — Art of Tea sends a different quantity of tea but the prices are the same. There’s also a sprawling shop of teas and tea-related products if you’re not a subscription person.
Pricing: A three-month subscription is $81, six months is $133 and a full year costs $254.
As if a warm cup of tea didn’t make you feel good enough, how about supporting only small tea farmers in the process? Verdant Tea Club functions like a CSA with teas that are selected each month from a single farmer to highlight their family’s work.Â
My first delivery included a toasty oolong, green tea and two rich black teas (all loose leaf) along with brewing instructions for each one and colorful background information on that month’s small farm.
Pricing: Verdant Tea Club costs $30 per month and will include anywhere from three to 10 teas totaling 75 grams (about 2.6 ounces). Those are likely to include hyper-seasonal teas and fresh, limited harvests, too. If you purchase three, six or 12 months in advance, the monthly cost drops a bit.
The Republic of Tea is a sprawling market of teas with a subscription option, should you choose it. Sign up for the Tea of the Month Club and you’ll get 50 bags of a new tea every 30 days. You can select a mixed tea subscription or all your teas in one category like black teas, herbal teas, wellness blends and more.Â
The big difference between this tea subscription service and most of the other tea subscription boxes is you can see the entire six or 12 months of tea deliveries ahead of time and decide beforehand if the assortment seems like one you’re interested in tasting. It also makes it the perfect gift subscription since you’ll know which teas are coming but your loved one will be surprised every month.
The tea from Republic of Tea is excellent but be aware that the subscription is a little more clunky and impersonal than the others. This is a good gift for the pragmatic tea drinker on your list.
Pricing: Six months of tea club deliveries is $109 and a full year is $190.
Source: CNET
