I distinctly remember my second order from them was almost 20 different varieties in sample sizes because I just wanted to start trying their entire range of offerings, but had to stop adding more once I found myself well over the $60 free shipping!
I love Arbor Teas! One of my favorite tisanes from them is “Holy Basil”. Super different, has a quality that I can only describe as “ancient herbs”, it feels like I’m being transported way back in time during a ceremony.
I really like MyTeaPal. Very flexible, robust and a really nice UI. Lets me keep track of all my teas with as much detail as I like, such as vendor, origin, elevation, cultivar, harvest year and season, caffeine, steeping instructions, and then there’s a website link if I ordered it online so I can look back at it, but I usually put all the details about the tea in the “details” section. I also copy the website image of the tea from the website so it looks really nice when looking at all of my teas.
And then it lets you track teaware as well much to the same level of detail (type, vendor, origin, material, volume, etc).
The beauty of setting all this up is when it comes time to log a brewing session. You select your tea and teaware, enter in the amount of tea leaves, the water type (filtered, distilled, spring, etc), and if you are rinsing the leaves before brewing. Then you get to log every infusion if you do multiple re-steepings. You can log the water temperature, the infusion time, and then a few notes about this particular infusion. It includes a timer with automatic additional time between infusions (+30 sec for example). Then you also get to add flavor profile tags (fruity, floral, earthy, etc) for the whole brew session. Perhaps this time because you lowered the temperature of the water, you’re getting hints of honey that you didn’t taste last time. Or this year’s harvest seems to have more notes of citrus than last year’s.
Then when you look back at your tea, you can see a list of all the brewing sessions you’ve had and read your infusion notes so you could try to recreate that or try something new to improve upon. You also get to see an aggregate of all the flavor profiles you have entered across all your brewing sessions, so if you’re browsing and in the mood for something “woody”, you can see which teas you’ve had before where you could taste that characteristic.
You can also have it automatically decrement the quantity of tea leaves you have when you brew, if you give it an accurate number to start with, and also fairly accurate with the amount you used for each brewing session. Then you can see which teas you have are running low and need to order more!
There is also a community aspect to it, which is cool for those who are in to that. My username is the same if you really want to look me up. :-P
This is one of my favorite pastimes, since they have such a large selection, I’ll get a few samples of tea I haven’t tried yet, and on a particular day I’ll open one up to brew and read all about it while sipping on it.