“No luxury is cheaper than tea.”

James Norwood Pratt

I recently paid 295 Swedish Crowns for 110g of tea, which at the time of writing is the equivalent of £24 GB, or $35 US.

The tea in question is a particularly nice Silver Needle white tea – full write-up to appear in due course.

Now, this sum of money might make some people wince, but first and foremost it has to be said that this is actually a relatively modest amount when you consider what a really expensive tea can go for – just look at the prices for a top-notch Tie Guan Yin, an aged Pu-erh, or the legendary Da Hong Pao.

Let’s return to my purchase, however, and do a breakdown on that price.

With a nice tea such as this, I’ll infuse it in my gaiwan, using 5 grams of leaf each time.

So, that gives me 22 servings from the 110 gram packet. This in turns gives a price per serving of roughly 13.5 Crowns.

As with all quality teas, it will be good for multiple infusions. The amount of tea I’ll extract from each serving of those leaves will be somewhere in the vicinity of 1.5 litres.

At a local supermarket 1.5 litres of a well known brand of a popular type of carbonated drink retails for 16.5 Crowns.

So there you have it. 16.5 Crowns for artificially flavoured and coloured bubbly sugar water, or slightly less for a hand made, naturally processed, great tasting, healthy beverage.

Personally speaking, I call that a bargain.