Specialty shops
Dark tea is the category where a shop earns its margin, because much of what you are buying is storage history.
A shop that has held a cake for ten years can tell you where it was kept, and that is the whole value of an old cake.
You can also smell a cake before you buy it, and a musty note is the one thing that should end the conversation.
Ask to see a cake they have open. Any shop selling aged dark tea should have one on the counter.
For ripe tea, shops are less necessary, because factory ripe tea is consistent and cheap everywhere.
The premium on raw cakes in a shop is significant, and it is paying for the storage rather than for the leaf.
Check how the cakes are kept: open shelves, paper wrappers, no plastic, and nothing strongly scented nearby.
Use the shop to taste aged raw tea you cannot afford, because that is how you learn what the target tastes like.
A good shop also tells you when a cake is not ready, which is worth more than any discount.
A 357 gram cake at 7 grams a session is roughly 50 sessions, which is a year of weekly drinking.
Online
Online is where most cakes are sold, and the whole problem is that a wrapper is easy to print and hard to verify.
Buy from sellers who state the factory, the recipe number and the year, and who have traded long enough to hold stock.
Sample first. A 25 gram sample from the actual cake is the only way to know what you are buying.
Ripe tea is the safe online purchase in this category, because it is cheap, consistent and hard to fake convincingly.
Raw cakes sold as decades old at modest prices are the standard trap, and the marketplaces are full of them.
Look at the seller’s range. A shop that sells everything sells nothing well, and that is especially true here.
Postage is heavy and cakes are dense, so combine orders into one shipment a year rather than several.
Photographs of the wrapper back and the broken edge are the useful ones, and their absence tells you something.
Use online for cheap ripe tea and for restocking a cake you have already tried from that seller.
Markets and direct
Markets are where dark tea has always been traded, and they remain the cheapest place to buy ripe tea.
You can taste before you buy, which matters because a bad fermentation is obvious in one cup.
You can also inspect the cake, check the wrapper and haggle, none of which is possible online.
The risk is age. A stall can say anything about a year, you cannot check it, and there is nobody to return to.
Unmarked cakes are everywhere, and they are cheap because the seller cannot say what they are either.
Buying direct from a factory, or through a group order with an invoice, is the best route to a specific recipe.
Group orders work well when one person knows the factory and will share the paperwork.
Take a reference: buy two cakes of the same nominal tea from different stalls and drink them against each other.
For aged raw tea, treat markets as the last resort rather than the cheapest option, because here they are the same thing.
A ripe brick of 250 grams costs very little and gives about 35 sessions, the cheapest tea per cup in the shop.
The practical mix
Buy ripe tea from wherever it is cheapest, which is usually online or a market, and do not overthink it.
Buy raw cakes only from a source with a decade of trading behind it, and start with samples.
Use a shop for aged raw tea you want to drink now, because the storage is the product and you cannot verify it online.
Split the spending so that most of it goes to ripe tea you drink, and a fixed small amount to raw cakes.
One or two raw cakes a year is enough for a private buyer, and more than that is a business.
Keep every wrapper, write the price and the year on it, and store the cakes together so the conditions match.
Drink one cake a year from whatever you have most of, or you will never learn whether your storage works.
Do not buy aged raw tea from any channel that cannot say where it was kept, and that includes most of them.
The test is unchanged across all three channels: factory, recipe, year, and someone willing to stand behind them.
Two raw cakes a year for five years is ten cakes, about 3.5 kilos, and more than most private buyers drink.