News, Updates & Announcements

Place Reviews: Local Tea Shops & Tea Houses

You can now review local tea places on RateTea! We added a major new section to the site where you can list and review tea shops, other stores selling tea, and places you can order and drink tea, like a tea house or tea room.

If you take a peek at the navigation bar at the top, you'll see a new tab, Places, between Regions and Articles. This will take you to a list-and-browse page of places, currently broken down by state, and probably to be broken down into finer regions later as more places get added. We may also add a map for browsing once enough places are listed to make such a map useful.

Also, for companies that have their own brand that also has retail stores, like Adagio Teas (which recently opened a few of its own retail stores, bringing it into competition with Teavana), we list the physical locations on the page for the brand.

We currently have five separate categories:

• Tea Shops - Retail stores focusing on selling tea, usually loose-leaf tea.
• Grocery Stores - We do not plan on listing all grocery stores, but we allow users to submit and review grocery stores, like Wegmans, that have a particularly good selection of tea.
• Tea Houses - Cafes serving tea in a sit-down atmosphere, that focus primarily or exclusively on tea, rather than coffee.
• Cafes or Coffee Shops - Cafes that serve high-quality tea, but where coffee and/or food is their primary focus.
• Tea Room - Sit-down dining establishments serving tea as a meal, like afternoon tea or high tea, with a focus on service and atmosphere.

We plan to add further categories as demand arises.

Another Feature: Wishlists

In addition to the places and place reviews, we have also snuck a few other features in recently. One of these is the Wishlist feature, which was suggested by one of our new top reviewers, Sarsonator.

Whenever you are logged in, and you are viewing the page for a tea or a tea review, you can now add the tea to your wishlist. The wishlist functions like a list of favorites or bookmarks. It's a great way to save or note teas that you may want to look up or reference later.

You can view your own wishlist by going to your profile. You can also view other people's tea wishlists, from their profile, if they have added any teas to them.

Check these features out and let us know what you think!

We are continuously developing the site, refining the interface, and fixing bugs. Let us know if there are any ways we can further improve any of these features, or if there are any other major features you'd like us to add.

Redesigned Profiles with New Features

We recently upgraded our profile pages. The new profiles look much nicer and have a bunch of new features. Each profile now has three sections: About, a feed of tea Reviews, and a list of numerical tea Ratings.

You don't need to do anything to benefit from the new profile, but if you haven't yet filled out your profile we encourage you to do so. Log in and use the Profile link in the top right to see and edit yours.

Linking With Social Media Profiles

Previously we allowed users to enter their Twitter and Steepster screennames, as well as a tea blog and other website. We have greatly expanded the selection of social media sites offered, now listing Facebook, Google+, Tumblr, Pinterest, along with Twitter and Steepster.

For the self-promoters out there, this new tool will allow you to build more of an audience through your use of RateTea. Is your favorite social media site not listed? Contact us and we can get it added.

Filters on Review Feed and Rating List

Want to browse reviews by a particular person, but only look at their reviews of pure teas, or only Japanese teas? Want a list of your own ratings of all Earl Grey teas?

We have long since had advanced filtering features in the search and browse functions of our site, allowing people to filter lists of teas by brand, style, and region. With the new profiles, we expanded this functionality to the feed of reviews on each user's profile. We also made this feature easier to access. Currently, the review feed and rating lists can filter by region and style, and we plan to expand this functionality further.

Visit your own profile, use the people page to locate other reviewers' profiles, or browse the master feed of reviews to check this out for yourself.

We are continually improving the filtering features, so if there is something that you want to be able to search or filter by which is not listed, please contact us and we can make it a priority.

We hope you enjoy the new profiles!

New Facebook Page, Footer, and Focus on Regions

Re-creating our Facebook page

We recently deleted and re-created our Facebook page to reflect our name change from RateTea.net to RateTea. (Unfortunately, Facebook wouldn't let us rename the page.) Please visit and like our new page!

We have also created a Tumblr for RateTea, so all you Tumblrs can follow it. We are, of course, also still active on Twitter. You can find links to all these sites at the bottom-right of our page, in our footer, which we recently redesigned, giving easy one-click access to more pages on the site.

New focus on regions

The purpose of RateTea is to encourage people to develop their appreciation of tea and promote sustainability in the world of tea. One of the ways we do this is through helping people learn more about where their tea is produced.

We classify teas by brand, style, and region. We have recently undertaken a project to improve our articles on regions, and draw more attention to them. You will now find:

• More extensive articles
• More pictures
• Regions featured on the homepage

The major regions, which include the countries of China, India, Japan, Ceylon, Taiwan, and Kenya, the Chinese provinces of Fujian, Yunnan, Anhui, and Zhejiang, and the two Indian regions Darjeeling and Assam, are now all available in a single click from the homepage. We have also added greater detail for some regions, including county-level detail to Yunnan province.

Beyond the common regions, we especially recommend exploring articles on regions of tea that people in the West are likely to know less about. We have greatly expanded our articles on some of these regions. Of particular interest are the articles on Turkey and Vietnam, and we also recommend checking out regions like Indonesia, Malaysia, and South Korea.

Highlighting recent reviewers

We have reworked the Recent Reviews box on the homepage so that instead of showing the most recent five tea reviews, it now highlights the five most recent reviewers. Recent reviewers will now be featured on the homepage for a longer period of time.