How to Read a Tea Label
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A tea label tells you far more than the name on the front, but the useful parts are rarely the parts printed largest. Once you know which four or five details to look for, you can judge a tea before buying it and brew it correctly the first time instead of guessing at temperature and time.
Start with origin, and prefer specific over vague. A label naming a region, a garden, or an estate is telling you the leaf can be traced, which producers only bother with when the leaf is worth tracing. Generic country-level descriptions such as blended Chinese green cover leaf bought on volume from many sources, which is not automatically bad but does mean the character will change between batches without warning.
Look for a harvest date or a season rather than a best-before date. Best-before is a shelf-life guess set by the packer and tells you nothing about age. Harvest information does: green and white teas are at their best within roughly a year of picking and fade noticeably after that, while a first-flush spring pick and an autumn pick from the same garden taste like different teas entirely. If a green tea gives you only a best-before two years out, assume the leaf is not fresh.
Check the cultivar and grade when they are given. Cultivar is the plant variety and it predicts flavour more reliably than price does. Grade terminology varies by region and is easy to over-read, but the distinction that matters is whole leaf versus broken. Whole leaf unfurls slowly and can be re-steeped several times; broken leaf and fannings release everything at once, brew strong and fast, and turn bitter if you treat them like whole leaf.
Read the ingredients list on anything flavoured. Natural flavouring is a legal category, not a quality claim, and a label listing bergamot oil is making a more specific promise than one listing flavouring. If dried fruit or petals appear near the top of the list, a meaningful share of what you are paying for by weight is not tea.
Brewing guidance on the packet is a starting point, not an instruction. Take the temperature seriously, since that is where most teas are ruined, but treat the suggested time as the upper limit for your first attempt and taste early. Packers err long because a weak cup generates more complaints than a bitter one, and a leaf you are unfamiliar with is easier to judge from under-extracted than from over.
Finally, look at the packaging itself as part of the label. Tea degrades from light, air, moisture, and heat, so an opaque, resealable, foil-lined pouch protects the leaf and a clear plastic window does not, however attractive it looks on a shelf. Loose leaf sold from a large open jar has already been exposed to all four, which is fine if the shop turns over stock quickly and a problem if it does not.