Proportion

Finding actual good tea in Germany is harder than you’d think. Supermarkets are full of tea, but it’s mostly dust and flavorings—your basic blends are indistinguishable once you’ve had something real.

Paper & Tea is a Berlin company that decided to treat tea seriously. Not precious-seriously, just actually-seriously. Their Master Blends are combinations that sound weird on paper but taste exact: green tea with strawberry and basil, black tea with tobacco and fig, white tea with apricot and elderberry. Sprite’s Delight, Perfect Day, Jackpot Derby. The names sound like they could be self-parody, but the tea isn’t.

What’s unusual about these is they’re not oversaturated. Most specialty blends taste like a perfume bottle exploded—they throw everything at you at once. These are proportioned with restraint. The tobacco note in the black tea doesn’t overwhelm the fig. The basil in the green tea doesn’t bury the strawberry. The tea is the point, and the other ingredients make specific changes to it.

I don’t know when I started caring about this level of detail in tea. But there’s something satisfying about finding something where the work is obvious, where someone clearly thought through the balance instead of just mixing things that sound good together.