For me the best since a long time, when it's retired it means they are not produced anymore?

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Alex Zorach wrote: on February 18th, 2016

Welcome to RateTea!

And yes...this particular tea is not on the market any more...although...it's more the marketing of this particular tea, not necessarily the production. You might be able to get your hands on an FOP grade tea from Pettiagalla estate, or perhaps a different grade from this tea garden, or a similar grade from a different garden in the same region of Sri Lanka...and get that characteristic taste.

Basically, what happened here is that SpecialTeas closed. As a company, they were bought out by Teavana, which then closed them down. Originally, SpecialTeas had been the supplier of Teavana, and as Teavana grew, it become much bigger than SpecialTeas and bought them out, and then closed them. I'm not sure about the motivations behind it, but it may have been that SpecialTeas was selling the same products more cheaply (there is a consensus in the tea world that Teavana is overpriced) and people were starting to learn about that and Teavana thought it was undercutting their profits. Or it could be that Teavana wanted a more efficient operation, wanted to do direct sourcing and cut out the middleman, improving their profit margin that way too.

Regardless of why, it happened, and the company is permanently closed, and a lot of people mourned its loss because the general sentiment was that it had much better prices than Teavana.

Thankfully there are a ton of other companies out there. I've had some excellent Ceylon teas recently. I'd recommend looking at Harney & Sons and Upton Tea Imports as two companies I've had good ceylon teas from recently. I can't quite recommend a specific tea because I don't know exactly what qualities in a tea you are looking for though.

Let me know though if you have more questions, either about the website, or about tea. And I look forward to reading more reviews!

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