Two different purchases
Daily tea and collected tea are two different purchases, and the same shop will happily sell you the wrong one for the other purpose.
A daily tea is a consumable. You want it fresh, consistent and cheap enough to drink without thinking about it.
A collected tea is a bet on what it will be worth later, and it only pays out if three things line up: the leaf, the storage and the paperwork.
Green tea is the weakest category for collecting and one of the strongest for daily drinking, and that imbalance should shape everything you buy.
Green tea does not improve with age. It loses aroma within about 12 months and keeps losing it, and no storage method stops that.
So the honest framing here is not how to split your money between the two. It is why almost none of it should go into collecting green.
There is one narrow exception, and it is worth stating plainly so that it does not tempt you into the rest of the category.
For daily drinking
Buy the current season’s leaf, sealed, and drink it within six months. That is the whole rule, and everything else is detail.
Buy 100 grams at a time. At 3 grams a cup that is about 30 cups, which is a month of daily drinking for most people.
A Chinese pan-fired green and a Japanese steamed green cover most of what people actually want, and it is worth keeping one of each.
For everyday drinking, skip the famous names. A well made unnamed Longjing-style tea costs a fraction of a core-zone one and tastes close to it.
Keep it cold. Green tea stored at 0 to 5 degrees holds its aroma months longer than the same tea in a cupboard.
Buy a little more often rather than a lot at once. Two 100 gram bags bought three months apart beat one 200 gram bag.
Write the purchase date on the bag. After two months you will not remember, and the date decides how you should brew it.
Compare one Chinese and one Japanese green side by side at 80 degrees. The difference in how the leaf was fixed shows up immediately in the aroma.
For collecting
Be blunt about this: green tea is the category where collecting makes the least sense, and most people who try it lose money quietly.
The tea does not improve. What happens instead is that it stops tasting like green tea and starts tasting like nothing much.
The one narrow exception is a vacuum-sealed, cold-stored premium green bought to compare against next year’s harvest, which is a tasting exercise rather than an investment.
Everything sold as aged green tea is either a mistake or a story. There is no market for it and no tradition behind it.
If a seller offers you aged green tea at a premium, ask what it is supposed to taste like. The question usually ends the conversation.
What holds value in this category is knowledge rather than leaf. Knowing what a good spring Longjing tastes like is worth more next year than a tin of old one.
So if you want to collect something, collect references: 50 grams each of the three or four styles you like, replaced every year.
How to split your budget
Put effectively all of it into tea you will drink this year. For green tea the honest split is close to 100 per cent daily.
If you want to spend more, spend it on freshness and origin rather than on a quantity you cannot finish.
A reasonable annual budget for a daily green drinker is 500 to 700 grams, bought in four or five batches across the year.
That works out at roughly one purchase every two or three months, which is about the rate at which green tea starts to fade.
Keep a small separate line for one special purchase a year: a pre-Qingming Longjing, bought at 50 grams, drunk within weeks.
Treat that as a treat rather than an investment. It will not be worth anything in three years, and it does not need to be.
The trap to avoid is buying a kilo of good green tea because it was cheap. You will drink the first 200 grams fresh and the rest out of duty.
One rule covers most of it: buy what you will finish in three months, and never buy green tea in a quantity you would be sorry to throw away.