It has been in the original foil pouch with a bag clip, on the shelf directly above the kettle, which I suspect is most of the answer. Still, I want to know the realistic window even when stored properly. I drink about 4g a day so a 200g bag lasts me a long time. Is the fix better storage, or is it just never buying 200g of green tea again?
Above the kettle is the whole answer. Every time you boil, that shelf takes a blast of heat and steam, and green tea is the most fragile thing on it. Move it and your next bag will last twice as long with no other change.
The four enemies are heat, light, air and smell, and a foil pouch with a bag clip fails on air and mostly fails on the rest once opened. I moved to small opaque tins with a tight inner lid and immediately noticed teas holding character longer. Nothing expensive, mine came with tea originally. The other habit worth building is squeezing the air out of the pouch before clipping it, which sounds trivial and is not.
The freezer works and I have done it for years, but only if you are disciplined. Portion into small airtight bags with as little air as possible, and when you take one out let it come to room temperature while still sealed before opening. Open a cold bag in a warm kitchen and moisture condenses onto the leaf, which is worse than doing nothing. Never refreeze one you have opened. Done properly I have opened a bag a year later that was recognisably the tea I bought.
I am wary of recommending the freezer to people who will open a cold bag once and ruin 50g. For most of us a small opaque airtight tin in a cool cupboard plus smaller purchases gets 90 percent of the benefit with none of the failure modes.
That is a reasonable line to draw. I would only bother freezing something genuinely special that I cannot rebuy.
Green tea has a season and it is measured in months. Everything else in your cupboard is more forgiving than you think. Buy small, drink it, buy again.
Worth adding the opposite case so you do not over correct. Raw puerh, aged white and heavily roasted oolongs are the teas where time in a stable cupboard is doing you a favour rather than harm. I keep those separately and deliberately loosely, and the green and lightly oxidised things sealed and cold. Treating one cupboard as one storage policy is what caught me out.
@easy_pace_ellis · 2mo ago
Do the arithmetic and buy accordingly. At 4g a day, 200g is fifty days if you drink nothing else, and nobody drinks only one tea, so you were realistically looking at three or four months minimum. Green is the one category where I stopped buying volume no matter how good the price per gram looked. I buy 50g at a time now, which is under two weeks of daily drinking, and the difference in the cup between a fresh bag and a four month old one is not subtle. For roasted oolong or shou puerh I will happily buy 200g because they do not care.
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