The Best Tea Brands You Can Buy on Amazon

Cinnamon and orange, for the afternoon

Harney & Sons calls Hot Cinnamon Spice its most popular flavored tea worldwide. The tin lists black tea, orange peel, three kinds of cinnamon and cloves. No sugar, no sweetener, and yet it tastes sweet. Harney says so on its own site, and people who buy it say it too, often with surprise.

Open the tin and you smell cinnamon before you've filled the kettle. Once it steeps, the cup tastes like a spiced dessert with black tea underneath. A woman who doesn't drink tea bought it for her husband, who had asked for it by name. Now she's the one who wants it, and when she's craving something sweet she makes a cup of this instead. If I could keep only one flavored tea, it would be this tin.

Watch the clock, though. Leave a sachet in past five minutes and it gets fiery: one person who did called the result fire water, and settled on a five-minute timer. They also stirred it into hot cocoa on cold days.

John Harney started the company in 1983, blending in his basement, and Harney now makes more than 300 teas in Millerton, New York. Harney says to use water at a full boil, 212°F, and that a sachet can brew a second cup. A Harney sachet holds whole leaf in a mesh pyramid, sized for a 12-ounce cup, so at about $12 for 30 you're paying about 39 cents per big mug, or half that if you like the second steep.

Eight teas, six bags each, to learn what you like

If you don't know yet whether you're a black tea person or a peppermint person, this box finds out for about $20. You get six bags each of eight teas: English Breakfast, Earl Grey, Chai, Green Tea, Lemon and Ginger, Pure Peppermint, Camomile Honey and Vanilla, and a decaf English Breakfast. That's black, green, a chai, a decaf and three herbal teas without caffeine.

The Earl Grey alone is a reason to open it. It's black tea scented with bergamot, a kind of citrus, so it smells bright and slightly floral and tastes lighter than a breakfast tea. At 4 p.m., it's the one to make, with a slice of lemon rather than milk. Twinings tells the story of Earl Grey himself asking the company to recreate a blend in 1831.

People buy this box for other people more than for themselves: to keep tea on hand for visitors, or as a gift for someone who is hard to shop for and doesn't need more things. Not every bag wins everyone over. A fan of the box loved every tea except the Lemon and Ginger, which tasted of fake lemon and burned like hot sauce.

Twinings has the longest history here. Thomas Twining bought Tom's Coffee House on the Strand in London in 1706, and the company says it's still at number 216 Strand. Queen Victoria gave it its first Royal Warrant for tea in 1837.

Once you know which one you reach for, buy it in its own full box. If chai is the one, my chai caffeine explainer says what's in the cup.

Green tea from people who make green tea

Ito En is the Japanese company behind Oi Ocha, the bottled green tea, and this is its own tea bag: sencha, the everyday green tea leaf of Japan, with matcha powder mixed in. Ito En's page says there's no added color or flavor, and that you can brew the bags hot or cold. For green tea in a bag, I'd rather buy from a company that bottles green tea for a living than from a brand where green is one flavor out of forty.

Sencha tends to taste fresh and grassy, slightly savory, and the matcha gives the cup a greener color and more body than a plain green tea bag. It isn't whisked matcha, though. If you want to know the difference, what matcha is made of explains it. Brew it hot in winter; in summer, leave a few bags in a pitcher of cold water overnight.

It's also the gentler cup. By the USDA's numbers, 8 ounces of brewed green tea has about 28 mg of caffeine, against about 47 mg for black. Amazon charges $8.98 for 50 bags, the same as Ito En's own shop, so about 18 cents a cup.

A pound of loose leaf for the price of tea bags

Loose leaf has a reputation for costing more. Davidson's proves it doesn't have to. Its English Breakfast is organic black tea built on Assam, the Indian tea known for its malty strength, and Davidson's describes it as full-bodied with a malty finish. That's the taste you want under milk. A one-pound bag is about $27, and the listing tells you how much to use: 2 grams in an 8-ounce mug, three to five minutes in boiled water.

A pound is about 454 grams, so the bag makes about 227 mugs at that measure, or about 12 cents a cup. That's within a few cents of Yorkshire Tea and far below the Twinings sampler. Davidson's is based in Sparks, Nevada, and says it grows, imports, blends and packs the tea itself, starting from its farms in India.

Orange peel and spice, since 1945

Bigelow tells its own founding story, and it's my favorite on this page. In 1945 Ruth Campbell Bigelow, a designer, mixed black tea with orange rind and sweet spices in the kitchen of her New York City brownstone and gave it to friends. It got so many comments that she named it Constant Comment. Bigelow calls it the first specialty tea in the country.

In the cup, the orange comes first and the spice follows, gentler than Hot Cinnamon Spice. Its fans drink it hot or iced, and for one of them it's the taste of childhood. At about $6.39 for 20 bags, it's about 32 cents a cup, and there's a decaf version for the evening.

One thing people often assume about Bigelow: the family also owns the Charleston Tea Garden in South Carolina, bought in 2003, but its own FAQ says Bigelow teas aren't made from the leaves grown there. Buy it for the recipe, not for American-grown tea.

The bedtime cup, chamomile and mint

Celestial Seasonings started in Boulder in 1969 with herbs picked in the Rocky Mountains, and brought out Sleepytime in 1972. Celestial calls it the bestselling specialty tea of all time. The box lists chamomile, spearmint, lemongrass, tilia flowers, blackberry leaves, orange blossoms, hawthorn and rosebuds, and no caffeine.

It tastes of chamomile first, soft, somewhere between hay and honey, with spearmint that comes through clearly. One longtime drinker says that if you don't like mint, this might not be your tea. Someone else keeps a box for the nights they already know will be restless, and likes that it doesn't feel like taking medicine. It works best as the last cup of the evening, in a big mug, with nothing added.

At about $5.39 for 25 bags it's about 22 cents a cup, cheap enough for one box in the kitchen and another in a desk drawer.

Ginger heat, without caffeine

Rishi started in 1997 and buys its tea and herbs directly from the growers rather than through brokers. Turmeric Ginger has the best-seller badge on Rishi's own site, and every ingredient is organic: ginger root, turmeric root, licorice root, lemongrass, orange peel, lemon peel, and orange and lemon oils. Rishi suggests five to seven minutes of steeping.

This is the herbal tea for people who find chamomile too quiet. The ginger warms the back of your throat, the citrus keeps it bright, and the licorice adds a soft sweetness. People add honey, lemon or fresh mint. You can also make it cold: a sachet in the fridge overnight, and in the morning a cold, spicy tea. At about 67 cents a sachet it's the most expensive cup here; save it for a cold, gray afternoon.

The licorice matters for some people. Licorice root contains glycyrrhizin, and NCCIH links it, even in small amounts, to serious problems for people with high blood pressure or heart or kidney disease. Most teas sold for sore throats contain it too, which is why my sore throat tea guide sorts them by it.