Why we give tea away
We started tea.gratis because the discovery problem in specialty tea is real, and most of the industry solves it badly. A first-time drinker looking at a 100g bag of Mí Lán Xiāng (蜜兰香) at proper farm-direct pricing is being asked to gamble forty euros on a flavour they cannot picture. We watched too many of those gambles end with the tin pushed to the back of a kitchen cupboard — not because the tea was wrong, but because no one had been given a low-stakes way to meet it first.
So tea.gratis exists to do one thing well: put a 3–5g sample of carefully chosen leaf into the hands of someone who is curious, and charge only what shipping actually costs. No upsell screens, no countdown timers, no boxes within boxes. One season, one offer, one CTA per page. If you brew the sample and decide the tea is not for you, that is a perfectly good outcome — you learned something about your palate, and the farmer was still paid for the leaf you drank.
The second reason is honesty about scale. A 5g pouch is a taste, not a daily supply. We say that on every product page, because the alternative — pretending a sample is a relationship — is how trust gets burned. If a tea earns its place in your routine, the path to a full caddy lives at shop.thetea.app or shop.puerh.app, and we link there plainly when it is the right step.
The third reason is the farms. Every quarterly box, and every farm-drop awareness campaign, names the garden, the producer, and the harvest window. Sample programmes are often where new buyers form their first impression of an origin, and we refuse to let that impression be anonymous. If a leaf is good enough to put in your kettle, the person who made it is good enough to put on the label.
We are not trying to be the largest sampling programme in tea. We are trying to be the one that does not embarrass the people on either end of the package — the drinker, and the grower.
How the project started
tea.gratis began as an internal tool. Inside the THETEA constellation, we kept running into the same conversation: someone in our reading audience at thetea.app would write in asking which oolong to start with, and the only honest answer was “taste four and decide”. But there was no calm, single-purpose place to do that. The shops were built for buyers who already knew what they wanted. The encyclopedia was built for readers. Nothing in the network was built for the in-between moment — the moment of curiosity that has not yet hardened into a purchase.
We spent a season prototyping. The first version was a paper-form request that a colleague packed by hand from the Saint Petersburg warehouse, four sessions a week. The second version had a checkout but no urgency copy, no scarcity counters, no cross-sells — and conversion to a full-caddy order at shop.thetea.app was higher than any campaign we had run with traditional commerce pressure. That told us the calm version was not just kinder, it was correct. tea.gratis is the public, scalable form of that prototype.
Sourcing and farm relationships
The leaf in our quarterly boxes is not surplus. It is not last-season stock, it is not blends a roaster could not move, and it is not the bottom of someone else’s grading line. Each box draws from the same farm relationships that supply shop.thetea.app and shop.puerh.app, which means the same producers, the same harvest windows, and the same QC pass.
We pay the farm for the sample tea at the same per-gram rate we pay for retail-bound leaf. This matters. A sampling programme that asks growers to donate, or to discount their work to “marketing” pricing, is quietly transferring its acquisition cost onto the supply chain. We refuse that math. The sample programme is funded by the constellation, not by the people who grew the tea.
The farm-drop pages on tea.gratis are a separate format — limited awareness campaigns from a specific garden, often tied to a harvest event, sometimes tied to a charitable cause local to that garden. When a farm-drop is charity-linked, the page discloses exactly where contributions go, in plain numbers. You can read the route those leaves travelled on tea.travel, which maps the actual logistics of every origin we work with.
Where gratis sits in the constellation
tea.gratis is one of 36 sites in the THETEA network built by Teamotea. Each site does one job. The encyclopedia at thetea.app explains what a tea is. The school at tea.school teaches you how to read it. The shops at shop.thetea.app and shop.puerh.app sell it at caddy scale. The sensory tools at tea.degree help you describe what you are tasting. tea.gratis is the entry door — the place where the relationship begins, before any of those other sites need to be involved.
This structural separation is deliberate. A single mega-store with a sample section buried in a menu would have to compromise its voice — selling 50g caddies and giving away 5g sachets pull in opposite directions when they share a homepage. Splitting them lets each site be honest about its job. Here, the job is sampling, and only sampling. There is no full-caddy product on tea.gratis. If you want to buy the tea you sampled, we send you to the right shop with a direct link, and that page picks up cleanly from where this one left off.
Transparency, limits, and what we will not do
One sample box per person per quarter. We enforce this not because samples are scarce — they are not — but because the programme only works if it reaches new people. Stacking boxes turns sampling into a discount channel, which is a different product entirely, and not one we are interested in running.
Shipping cost is shown before you enter any payment field. It varies by region, it is calculated from real carrier rates, and we do not mark it up. If the shipping cost to your country makes the maths feel wrong, please do not order — we would rather you skip the box than feel cheated by the postal service on our behalf.
We will not run countdown timers. We will not show “only N left” counters. We will not send abandoned-cart emails with discount triggers. We will not put a sample programme behind a mandatory account signup with marketing pre-ticked. These are house-voice rules across the constellation, and they are stricter on tea.gratis than anywhere else, because the audience here is the most new to specialty tea and the least equipped to spot manipulation.