No endless catalogue, just collections: five teas from one region, chosen by our founder Eduardo Molina, one of the most accomplished tea sommeliers, from gardens he has visited himself. Each collection is an invitation to get to know a region, and we host tastings for every one. The tea comes straight to us in Berlin with no warehousing in between, so it reaches you fresh – and every pouch states the garden, tea maker, harvest month and batch.

Some are. Where an EU organic seal is available, we are glad to have it — behind it stands a strict standard with annual inspections, and for you it is the quickest answer there is. We simply cannot get it for every tea, and that has nothing to do with quality and everything to do with the size of the farms.

Our gardens are mostly small family holdings in remote highlands, picking by hand and producing a few hundred kilos a year. For them, certification is above all a cost: fees, annual inspections, documentation in a foreign language.

So we look at the way they work ourselves, on site and in detail. We ask to be shown everything and to see the evidence behind it, and we put a great deal of weight on a relationship of trust with the people who produce our tea. And sometimes the law is there ahead of us: in the Indian state of Sikkim, selling and using chemical pesticides has been prohibited since 2014, and since 2016 the entire state counts as fully organic.

Whether a tea is certified is stated on its product page.

We are currently shipping to Germany only due to new regulations of the EU. We hope to be able to ship to all EU countries soon again. Become part of the Eduard/ community to stay up to date.

Yes, you can find our teas in selected shops in Berlin. All current stockists are listed on our page Where to find us. Become a part of the Eduard/ Community to receive the latest updates.

On top of the statutory 14-day right of return, we offer the Eduard/ satisfaction guarantee: open the bag and brew the tea. Take a few cups to decide. If it isn’t for you, email us within 30 days of delivery and we’ll refund you in full — no return shipment. Keep the tea or pass it on to someone who’ll enjoy it.

The reason is simple: you only know how a tea tastes once it is in the cup. That risk should not be yours to carry. Everything else about returns is set out in our refund policy.

Soft, filtered water. A cup of tea is more than 99 % water — whatever is dissolved in it, you taste along with the tea. A filter is our first recommendation: we work with the Aarke Purifier, which turns even mediocre tap water into water worth drinking. Without a filter, reach for a low-mineral spring water such as Volvic.

Hard water you taste immediately: the infusion turns flat and dull, often with a chalky edge, and a fine film settles on the surface. The minerals sit in front of exactly those notes we pick the gardens for — and the finer the tea, the bigger the loss. One and the same tea can taste like two different teas, depending on nothing but the water.

The same goes for cold brew: filtered water, straight into the fridge. Which temperature a tea prefers is printed on its pouch and listed on its product page.

Absolutely! And the second infusion is often the best one. A supermarket tea bag works differently: the tea inside is broken leaf, often little more than dust, and gives everything away at first contact with water — a second pour leaves you with brown water. Our leaves are whole. They need the first infusion just to open up, and release their flavour across several more — with tightly rolled wulongs, five or six is nothing unusual.

And the tea does not stay the same. The readily soluble compounds come out first: the volatile aromatics, the amino acids, much of the caffeine — which makes the first infusion the brightest and most fragrant. The middle ones grow denser, rounder, sweeter; for most teas that is the peak. The last ones turn quieter and more mineral. Chinese has its own word for the sweetness that lingers in the throat afterwards: 回甘, huigan, “returning sweetness”. A tea poured four times is less a cup than a short journey — which is why every one of our pouches gives you a steeping time for several infusions, not just one.

In China this is simply how tea is made. In gongfu cha (工夫茶, roughly “tea made with time and care”), a lot of leaf goes into a small pot with little water, steeped for ten or twenty seconds at a time, each round a touch longer than the last. Eight to fifteen infusions are not the exception but the whole point: you are not drinking a cup of tea, you are following one leaf through an afternoon. At home the principle is enough — same leaves, same amount of water, a little longer each time, and use the wet leaves up the same day.

No – not at the moment. Every true tea comes from the same plant, Camellia sinensis, whether it's white, green, wulong or black. And that plant contains caffeine. Rooibos, camomile and peppermint are often called tea, but they come from other plants.

We don't stock decaffeinated teas. The process needed to remove the caffeine also strips important flavour compounds from the leaf and severely compromises the tea's profile.

How much caffeine ends up in your cup varies a lot, though. See also Do intensity and caffeine go together?

Tea also works differently from coffee. That isn't down to the caffeine itself, because theine and caffeine are the same substance under two names. The difference is what else tea contains: the amino acid L-theanine. It balances out the effect of the caffeine. That's why many people find tea keeps them alert but feels calmer and steadier than coffee.

Less than most people assume. What you taste as intensity comes from tannins, oxidation and roasted notes — caffeine itself is barely noticeable in the cup. A pale, gentle tea can carry more of it than a dark, robust one. That is why we show the two scales separately.

The reason lies in the plant. Caffeine is not there for our benefit but as a defence: the tea plant builds it to keep insects away from its youngest shoots. That is exactly where it sits most densely — in the bud and the top leaves, while older, tougher leaves hold less. A tea made from buds alone, pale in the cup and delicate on the palate, therefore often sits higher on the caffeine scale than a dark black tea. Variety, altitude, temperature and the moment of harvest all play their part, and so does the cup itself: how much leaf you use, how hot the water is and how long it steeps decide how much caffeine actually ends up in your brew.

The scale helps to put that in perspective. Depending on leaf and brew, a cup of tea sits somewhere between 10 and 70 milligrams of caffeine — at the bottom light infusions of stems and older leaves, at the top a generously dosed black tea from young leaf. A cup of coffee starts at around 90 milligrams and climbs to 200 and beyond, depending on bean, roast and dose. Coffee, in other words, begins roughly where tea leaves off.

The curious part: dry tea leaf holds a higher share of caffeine than a coffee bean does. What decides is not the content of the raw material but how much of it makes its way into the water — and that takes surface. A bean is ground; a whole leaf gives up only part of what it holds in two minutes of steeping. Which is exactly why matcha is the exception among teas: it is milled to a fine powder and not infused but drunk whole, leaf and caffeine together. A bowl of matcha therefore sits closer to coffee than to tea.