Specialty shops
For jasmine, a shop is the best channel, because the aroma is the product and it has to be smelled.
The difference between three rounds and seven rounds of scenting is obvious in the nose and invisible in a listing.
Ask when it was scented. Scenting happens in summer, and a shop that knows its stock knows the season.
For compressed tea, a shop lets you look at a whole cake, which is the only way to check that the surface matches the middle.
A specialist will break a cake for you or sell you a cut piece, which is the safest way to buy aged tea.
The margin on cakes in a shop is often smaller than people expect, because the shop has already taken the storage risk.
What you are really paying for is the ability to walk away, which you cannot do online.
Check that cakes are stored away from the scented teas, because jasmine perfumes anything kept beside it.
Use the shop to learn what a well-stored cake smells like, then buy with confidence anywhere.
A 50 gram bag of seven-round jasmine costs roughly twice a three-round one, and the gap is easy to smell.
Online
Online is where most compressed tea is bought and where most of the money is lost, because the wrapper is the only evidence.
Buy from sellers who print the factory, the recipe number and the pressing year on the listing, not only in the description.
Samples are the answer. A 25 gram sample of the actual cake costs little and tells you what the photograph cannot.
Avoid listings built on a story, especially warehouse finds and private collections. Those are the two standard fictions.
For jasmine, buy from a seller who states the number of rounds, and treat a listing without it as three.
Postage on cakes is heavy, so combine orders rather than buying one cake at a time.
Look for photographs of the broken edge and the back of the wrapper, because those are the hard ones to fake.
Check how long the seller has been trading. A shop ten years old can hold stock that old, and a new one cannot.
Use online for cheap ripe tea and for restocking a cake you have already tried from that seller.
Markets and direct
Markets are the traditional channel for compressed tea and still the cheapest, if you can verify what you are buying.
You can inspect the whole cake, break it, and smell the interior, which no other channel allows.
You can also taste before paying, and for ripe tea one cup is enough to know whether the fermentation was clean.
What you cannot do is verify the age, and the age is where most of the price sits.
Unmarked cakes are common at markets, and they are cheap for the same reason unlabelled food is cheap.
Buying direct from a factory, or through a group order with an invoice, is the best route to a specific recipe.
Group orders work when someone in the group has done it before and will show the paperwork.
For jasmine, markets are excellent in summer and poor the rest of the year, because the scenting season is short.
Take a reference cake with you, or buy the same tea from two stalls and compare them at home.
A standard cake is 357 grams, and at a market the same thing often costs a third less than online.
The practical mix
Buy jasmine from a shop, buy ripe tea from anywhere, and buy raw cakes only from a source you have tested.
Start with samples from two or three sellers of the same nominal cake, which is the fastest education available.
Once one seller has been right three times, concentrate the cake buying there rather than chasing cheaper listings.
Keep the jasmine buying small and frequent, and the cake buying infrequent and considered.
A workable year is four or five jasmine purchases and one or two cakes, and not the other way round.
Use a market for ripe tea and for jasmine in summer, and avoid it entirely for anything sold on its age.
Keep every wrapper and write the price and the date on it, because a cake without a record is just a disc.
Do not let the cake side of the budget grow. It is the half that rewards patience, and patience is not a purchase.
The test for every channel is the same: factory, year, and some way of checking them.
Fifty grams of jasmine at 3 grams a cup is about 16 cups, which is two to three weeks of daily drinking.