Best time to find spring tea

[Pentox]

So what do vendors usually do with the previous year's teas when the new ones come out? Most sites seems to only have teas from the current year. My guess is that they discount them to try to get rid of them?

It's normally a race to try to discount their teas before the new ones come out, ideally vendors like to run out of the last year just as the first of the new years are coming in. Others will just be sold out of stuff in the interim break.

[Chip]

I ordered some teas from first harvest and the same teas from the same vendor closer to the end of the year. It seemed to me that I could indeed tell a difference, but it wasn't earth-shattering.

Tea is more robust than we sometimes give it credit for.

Very true! Usually only the early-harvested teas (March harvest, or whenever the earliest season is) show biggest differences between newest and well-preserved last year tea. Those are also the teas that can hardly achieve >6 months (or >3months) shelf life. Most affordable and available products in market are not those earliest harvests anyway.

Might not be as noticable for some Chinese greens (in fact a select few of them actually can improve a little with some aging).

But finer Japanese sencha, I am already discerning an ever so slight "aging" even in newly opened bags. This sometimes isn't noticable because it is so slight, but then when one opens a bag of shincha, the difference is very apparent.

[Chip]

So what do vendors usually do with the previous year's teas when the new ones come out? Most sites seems to only have teas from the current year. My guess is that they discount them to try to get rid of them?

It's normally a race to try to discount their teas before the new ones come out, ideally vendors like to run out of the last year just as the first of the new years are coming in. Others will just be sold out of stuff in the interim break.

And then others will simply use up the old stuff til it is gone before breaking out the new stuff. I noticed this with Upton (in fact was so told) which was yet another reason I stopped shopping there.

[woozl]

I just ordered a few samples from upton so we'll see....
They seem to have lots of different teas and samples are cheap enough

[gingkoseto]

In China, tea of the previous year, when a supplier has a lot of it left, they can sell it to factories for low price and the tea leaves will be used to make tea pillows

But I believe some suppliers sell old tea to other factories to make teabags.

And the recent trend to make "black/red tea" long jing and bi luo chun, I have been wondering if they use older tea to do it