Our Sourcing

Six origins. Six gardens. Six men and women whose names we know. Saint Graal does not buy on the spot market and does not blend at scale. Every tea in the box is bought from a single producer with whom we have worked, in some cases, for more than a decade.

What we look for

We look for three things: place, process, and person. The garden has to be at the right elevation, in the right climate, planted with the right cultivar. The processing has to be done in the traditional way for the style — orthodox for Darjeeling, shaded and stone-milled for matcha, hand-roasted over charcoal for hōjicha, sun-dried and aged for sheng pu-erh. And it has to be done by someone who has done it long enough to know what good looks like at every stage of the cup.

What we don't do

We don't blend cheaper origins to hit a price. We don't substitute when a harvest is small. We don't rebrand bulk auction tea as small-lot tea. If a season is short, we sell out. If a producer is unable to deliver, we explain why and we wait.

The producers

• Darjeeling · West Bengal, India · First-flush from a single estate at 1,800–2,000 metres in the Himalayan foothills.
• Earl Grey · Sri Lanka + Calabria, Italy · Ceylon Uva-district base, scented with cold-pressed Calabrian bergamot oil from a single grower.
• Sencha · Kagoshima, Japan · Asanoka cultivar from a small Yakushima-adjacent garden, steamed for forty seconds and rolled the same day.
• Hōjicha · Uji, Kyoto, Japan · Karigane (stem-and-leaf) from a small roastery that still uses charcoal in handful-sized batches.
• Tieguanyin Oolong · Anxi, Fujian, China · Light-style oolong from a single Anxi grower; semi-rolled, partially oxidized, and finished by hand.
• Sheng Pu-Erh · Yunnan, China · Raw pu-erh from ancient large-leaf assamica trees, sun-dried, lightly compressed, and aged five to seven years.

Visit, eventually

James has spent his career in tea, and over those years he has travelled personally to many of these regions — Darjeeling, Kyoto, Anxi, Yunnan and others — as a tea expert. He doesn't visit every garden every year, but he has been there, and the eye that picks our leaf is the eye that has seen.

We are working on a small-group Origin Trip programme that will let a handful of our customers travel to the gardens themselves. If you'd like to be notified when it launches, email us at origins@thesaintgraal.com.