How to store tea

The perfect place to store tea is a wooden cupboard with "holes", located in a well-ventilated room with a more or less constant temperature and normal humidity (excessive dryness, as well as excessive humidity makes tea harmful).

The cupboard must be made of a neutral wood, without own smell - for example, Bamboo and without excess paint.

There should be no strong extraneous smells in the room.

In short, any self-respecting tea lover should have a separate tea warehouse (and sometimes more than one) with several separate cabinets intended for the storage of different varieties of tea and don’t mix oolongs with black or matured tea.

We get a lot of questions about the correct storage of tea, especially the confusion occurs with the recommendations to store tea in the freezer. The answers on the forums can be opposite, and everyone will be following these own beliefs.

But the basic principles are the same. The tea does not like:

• humidity
• oxygen
• smells
• sunlight
• temperature

It follows that tea should be stored in a cool dark place in an airtight, sealed container. It can be a glass jar, a sealed bag, and the package should be placed in a cabinet with a door or in a refrigerator if the ambient temperature is high.

Only some types of tea, such as Long Feng Xia Oolong, should be stored in the freezer. These are weakly fermented teas, and putting them in the freezer, we don’t care about freezing and storing them at low temperatures, but about reducing the effect of humidity on the tea. In this case, you must definitely take care of the tightness of the packaging if the tea is stored in an ordinary refrigerator, next to other food products.