About
Why Teadar?
Teadar is an indie project built to bring radical transparency, unified naming, and genuine discovery to a market that desperately needs it.
An indie project built to bring transparency and discovery to the fragmented world of specialty tea.
The Origin Story
Problems I kept running into, and couldn't ignore.
Teadar started as a personal itch. As someone deep in the gongfu cha world, I kept bumping into the same problems—and watching my friends hit them too. The specialty tea market has incredible depth, but it's held together with duct tape and good intentions.
Eventually, I decided to stop complaining and start building.
A Fragmented Market
There are dozens of small, independent tea vendors, each with their own pricing, naming conventions, and inventory. Making a good purchase decision means checking half a dozen shops, staying up to date on what's in stock, and trying to figure out if you're paying a reasonable price—or just subsidizing someone's Instagram budget.
The Naming Problem
A massive part of the love of tea is discovering new cultivars and unexplored flavor profiles. But the same tea gets named completely differently across vendors. It's nearly impossible to map what you've tasted, understand what to expect next, or find a specific cultivar sold under three different names on three different sites.
Tracking & Reviews
Existing review platforms like Steepster feel stuck a few generations behind. And while my.teadb.org is genuinely excellent—huge respect to the folks who built it—I don't think it's accessible enough for the average tea enthusiast who just wants to keep track of what they've tried.
Reading Between the Lines
Separating the marketing from the leaves.
The Goal
Your Superpower in the Tea Market
A vendor's ability to market their tea has very little correlation with the actual quality of the leaves. Beautiful photography, clean packaging, and a polished brand story can mask mediocre sourcing—just as an ugly Shopify site with broken English can hide an extraordinary, direct-from-farm operation.
Teadar was built to cut through this. By aggregating data across dozens of reputable vendors, neutralizing the marketing, and focusing purely on the intrinsic data of the leaves—cultivar, harvest date, elevation, price per gram—we want you to feel like you have a superpower when navigating this market.
Accessibility
Tea Without the Gatekeeping
One of the biggest barriers to getting into specialty tea is the wall of Chinese and Taiwanese terminology. Oxidation levels, mountain names, cultivar codes—it's a lot. And while that depth is part of the beauty of tea culture, it shouldn't be the reason someone gives up.
Teadar translates this entire world into approachable, intuitive language. English names, visual flavor profiles, and guided discovery tools are all designed so that a total newcomer can find something incredible on their first visit—while a seasoned enthusiast can toggle to local naming and geek out with full provenance data.
Independent & Unsponsored
No ads, no affiliate links, no hidden agendas.
This platform is entirely an independent passion project. We don't sell tea, we don't run ads, and there is no affiliate tracking. Every vendor recommendation and quality score is generated from real data—not from whoever pays the most.
The only goal is to make it easier for people to discover incredible teas from vendors who prioritize quality and transparency over marketing. If Teadar helps even one person find a tea they love at a fair price, it's done its job.
Disclosure: Teadar is a personal hobby project built entirely in the creator's spare time. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to any employer. All data, rankings, and vendor recommendations are generated independently from publicly available information.
Data & Methodology
How we build trustworthy tea intelligence.
Teadar maintains a continuously updated catalog of specialty teas sourced from independent vendors worldwide. Every data point — price, cultivar, origin, harvest date, tasting notes — is extracted directly from vendor product pages using automated crawlers, then normalized through our taxonomy engine to enable cross-vendor comparison.
Scoring Methodology
Our Tea Quality Score (TQS) and Vendor Quality Score (VQS) are computed from multiple objective signals: price-per-gram relative to category median, catalog breadth and depth, provenance data completeness (cultivar, harvest date, elevation), community ratings, and stocking patterns. No vendor can pay to influence their score.
Taxonomy & Naming
Tea naming is notoriously inconsistent across vendors. Our taxonomy engine normalizes cultivar names (Da Hong Pao ≈ Big Red Robe ≈ 大红袍), resolves regional aliases, and maps teas to their geographic origin down to the village level. This enables accurate cross-vendor comparison and cultivar-level discovery that no other platform provides.
Ready to explore?
Browse the full tea catalog, discover what's in season, or let the Concierge find a personalized flight matched to your palate.