Ever get the urge to drink your money away without inflicting significant liver damage? Get ready to meet the most expensive teas in the world.
That’s right; even tea has an artisanal price hierarchy going on, like wine, stamps or babysitters (you pay more for the security of your cutlery drawer – welcome to life).
Today, I’m going to take you on a journey through 10 of the world’s most expensive teas for no real reason other than grim curiosity. Like walking along the sea-front in Monaco to look at all the yachts you’ll never afford.
Only with tea. Actual tea. In mugs. Crazy.
#10. Tienchi Flower
I’m a simple man with simple needs and one of them is for list articles to work chronologically, where possible, and by lowest – highest when it comes to price. So we’re going to start where everybody else starts: Tienchi flower tea.
The Tienchi flower looks something like a small broccoli shoot and is predominantly cultivated in China. It’s a rather delicate tea which has a long, cultured, history of being a sort of ‘cure all’ elixir in terms of its health benefits and the crazy antioxidant count packed away in its leaves.
Its most popular use in modern times is to cure or diminish insomnia and other restlessness disorders (which some of us would pay full mortgages to achieve), which is perhaps partly why this funky looking tea costs around $170 per kilogram.
Some random facts: the scientific name for the flower is ‘Panax notoginseng’ and, would you believe it, the pure brew tends to have quite a potent ginseng-y flavor to it.
#9. Silver Tips Imperial Tea
Things start to get a little less simple as soon as you move on from the ‘humble’ Tienchi flower. Silver Tips Imperial tea is the most sought after type of Darjeeling tea available on the market today.
I use the word ‘available’ with an intentional hint of irony, incidentally, seeing as this tea will likely set you back around $400 per kilogram.
Why? Well, partly due to scarcity and the complex nature of processing and cultivating this particular tea. It originally comes from India, which is still where it’s most commonly traded, but it only grows in specific terrain, on very particular tea farms and even then the farmers will only harvest it during full moons.
No, research has not yet shown that there’s any werewolf-y effects of drinking it, but who’s going to fund research into a tea that costs $400 per kilo?
The ‘silver’ part does kind of put paid to the idea, right enough. Which name stems from the fact that the leaves of the plant have a silvery tinge to them.
I guess that means that one kilo of silver is equal to $400. An economics lesson and a tea lesson rolled into one, lucky you.
#8. Gyokuro Tea
Gyokuro tea is another sort of diva of the tea world. It needs very specific conditions in order to thrive and it demands to be paid highly for its work.
Unlike most other teas, Gyokuro tea isn’t crushed, ripped or ‘bruised’ during or before the production process, instead the leaves are given a little holiday: shielded from the sun for around two weeks or so.
This method has a huge effect over the resulting taste of the tea, as it allows for the natural amino acids in the leaves to increase and therefore sweeten the flavor and smells.
Traditionally, this tea is cultivated in the Uji district of Japan, which (again) limits how much of it can be processed as compared to some more global and wide-reaching basic teas that we enjoy today.
Plus there’s that price tag of ~$650 per kilogram.
The good thing about this one is that the leaves are bright green in color and tend to result in a pale green infusion once the brew is ready… So if you want to impress your tea-philistine friends, you can just slap some normal green tea in a mug and lie.
I didn’t tell you that, though. Keep moving.
#7. Poo Poo Pu-erh
… Promise not to laugh? No, really, promise me… Okay… Poo Poo Pu-erh tea. Hey, you promised!
I feel like the deeper we go into this list, the weirder things are getting… This time we’re not even strictly dealing with tea leaves themselves, but the literal ‘poo poo’ of various insects that eat them. Yeah, the name’s no joke.
The insects eat Pu-Erh leaves, go about their day, visit the restroom and then very meticulous tea farmers will sort through the droppings with tweezers, magnifying glasses and clothes-pegs on their noses.
Apparently, a lot of the medicinal properties of the original Pu-Erh tea are concentrated in this form (cholesterol lowering, fat busting, relaxing, aids in digestion etc.). So, I guess, it’s no wonder that you’re looking at $1,000 per kilogram of…poo-erh.
#6. Yellow Gold Tea Buds
As far as I’m concerned, this one is cheating from the get-go. Yellow Gold tea is exactly what it sounds like… tea-leaves which are literally painted with gold. I mean, come on. I could paint my toenails gold and charge these kinds of prices if I wanted…
Wow, sometimes winning business ideas just come to you from the blue, huh?
Anyway, Yellow Gold tea is also only grown in specific farms in Singapore and even then, it’s only harvested from one particular mountain and even then, only on one day out of the year.
After the buds are cut from the plants (using special scissors, on account of the gold and all), they are sun-dried and stored away in airtight conditions until they turn a deeper yellow. This signifies the release of polyphenols.
Yeah, even with that gold content, this stuff is still held up as one of the healthiest teas around – the healing properties of gold have been touted across Asia for centuries, actually.
So, all of that being said… This little tea will set you back $3,000 per kilogram. Hardly surprising, really.
#5. Tieguanyin tea
Here we have our first dead-heat between two teas. I’ll just let you know, off the bat, that Tieguanyin tea costs around $3,000 per kilogram, just the same as the yellow gold tea leaves.
Only, instead of being lathered in literal precious metals and sanctioned to harvesting only one day out of the year, Tieguanyin tea is a pretty chilled little brew, if you’ll pardon the oxymoron.
Like many of the world’s priciest teas, this one is a variety of oolong tea and was named after a Buddhist god figure who represented mercy.
Now, if you’re a tea buff, you’ll know that even standard oolongs are among the most complex and time consuming types of tea to process, which is why they’re usually a little more expensive (dried, rolled, rested, rolled, rested, rolled, rested oxidized and then finally heat treated).
Consider that, in addition, this specific type of tea is harvested only on the highest mountains in the Anxi County, in Fujin and that the leaves are supposedly reusable up to seven times whilst stilling giving off a strong chestnut flavor…You can begin to see, a little bit, why it’s priced so highly.
No? Still struggling to rationalize it? Yeah, me too, to be honest.
#4. Vintage Narcissus, aka Wuyi Oolong tea
Right off the blocks, you’ve got to assume that anything given the name ‘Narcissus’ isn’t going to come cheap.
And yeah, you’ve guessed right, it does get its name from the mythological figure, although quite why is another question altogether.
Maybe you should buy some and show it its own reflection to see what happens… Ha! Joking, obviously, as you’d need a spare $6,500 to grab a kilogram of this stuff.
Vintage Narcissus/Wuyi oolong is, as you’d expect, an oolong tea (usually oxidized to around 60%) and is very rare due to its location in the Wuyi mountains and the fact that it’s usually only harvested and roasted once every two years or so but by all accounts, this helps to make it one of the more delectable oolong teas out there, with a really unique and complex flavor of chocolate, dull nutty/woody/earthy notes and a weirdly floral tinge to it all.
A storm in a teacup, if you will.
Part of the heavy price tag is down to the aging process that often goes into Vintage Narcissus (the vintage part, yep) – some of it is aged for as long as 50 years before being sold for exorbitant prices.
#3. Panda Dung Tea
Look, I’m sorry about this… I promise this isn’t some weird poop agenda I have. If you’ve got an issue with it then take it up with the tea industry, I’m just the messenger.
Admittedly, things are a little different this time around: it’s not another Poo Poo Pu-Erh situation. Panda Dung tea is really just tea that uses panda dung as fertilizer.
Why pandas specifically? Well, apparently they’re not doing a whole lot else for their species these days, so they might as well earn a crust for defecating.
No, no. I joke. The actual thinking behind it is that pandas have quite a bamboo-heavy diet but that their bodies only really suck up around a third of the basic nutrients in the plants.
Thus…when it passes through, a huge percentage of those nutrients are now intertwined with the soil.
One of the biggest health boons from this type of tea is thought to be a cancer-prevention benefit, alongside some lesser green teas; unfortunately this kind of nutritious, health boosting brew comes with a significant price tag of $75,000 per kilogram.
It’s probably cheaper to just eat lots of bamboo and try and fertilize your own plants. Ha. Just joking. Can you pass the toilet paper?
#2. PG Tips Diamond Tea
Let’s step things up a huge rung on the price-ladder, here. We’re getting to the flashy finish line. And when it comes to the most expensive teas in the world, that’s nothing to shake a stick at.
Enter PG Tips’ Diamond tea. The clue’s in the name. Now, strictly speaking, this isn’t a normal kind of tea that’s widely available… It was actually a charity stunt of sorts that, somehow, grew in popularity amongst the types of folk that can afford diamond studded teabags.
Yeah, let me say that again: actual teabags studded with diamonds and filled with that silver tips imperial tea we talked about earlier.
So, tea-wise, you already know the facts and tastes; but if you’re curious about how much some people are willing to pay for a (one last time) diamond encrusted teabag then the answer is around $15,000 per bag. PER BAG.
God help you if you accidentally swallow one. You thought panda dung was worth something? Ha. Wait until you’re fishing around in your toilet bowl for that rogue diamond. Then you’ll know the true worth of poo.
#1. Da Hong Pao
What are you drinking right now? A warm cup of breakfast tea? Sounds nice; milk and sugar? Yum. How much did that cost you?
Oh, yeah? Five bucks for a box of teabags? Not bad, not bad.
How about a million dollars for one cup? Sorry, I should have waited until you swallowed that…Want a napkin?
Here we are, at the logical end to the most expensive teas journey… You already know the price. I spoiled it just now like the worst storyteller of all time, but how can you keep that sort of thing under wraps?
Da Hong Pao, a very prestigious Chinese oolong tea with a floral aroma and intricate network of flavors, as well as apparently astounding health benefits ranging from the usual oolong parade (dental health, cardiovascular health, cancer-prevention etc.) to a near mythical, vague claim of simply: ‘saving lives’.
This is the apotheosis of tea. There is nowhere to go from here. This tea is valued as being more expensive than actual solid gold.
And to top it off: the original, traditional plants that give off this tea were last harvested over a decade ago, so this price ain’t dropping.
Ready for it one last time? Approximately $1.2 million per kilogram.
Imagine dunking your supermarket biscuits in THAT.