Storage
Storing leaf through a damp Flemish winter
Nobody mentions storage until something has gone wrong, and the thing that goes wrong is usually gradual enough that you blame the leaf, the water or yourself for three months before you look at the jar.
What the air in this flat is doing
I put a cheap hygrometer on the kitchen shelf in the autumn of 2024, mostly out of curiosity, and it has been the most informative four euros I have spent on any of this. From early November to the end of February the indoor humidity here sits between sixty-eight and seventy-six percent, and on a wet week with the heating off it touches eighty. The building is brick, ground floor, and one wall faces a courtyard that never gets direct sun between October and March.
Dry tea leaf is hygroscopic. It sits somewhere around four to six percent moisture when it is properly dried and it will happily pull itself up towards eight or nine in air like this, given an opening. At that point two things happen that I can taste: the aroma goes first, because the volatile compounds leave with the moisture exchange, and then a slightly stale, hay-like note arrives underneath. Green and lightly oxidised leaf show it in weeks. Heavily oxidised black leaf takes months and is more forgiving, which is presumably why it was the tea that travelled.
Summer here is the opposite problem in a mild form: warmer, drier, and with more light coming in the window. Heat and light do their own damage at their own pace, but neither has ever cost me a jar the way a damp winter has.
Tins, bags and where the air actually gets in
I have used all of the obvious containers and the differences are not where I assumed. A double-lidded tin, with an inner press-fit lid under the outer one, is excellent and has kept a green leaf in good order for five months through a winter. A single-lidded decorative tin is close to useless: the lid is a friction fit on a rolled edge and you can feel the air move when you replace it.
Glass jars with a rubber gasket and a clip seal very well against air and very badly against light, so they live inside a cupboard with the door shut or they are no better than a paper bag on a shelf. The foil-lined bags that leaf often arrives in are genuinely good if they can be resealed properly, and mostly they cannot, because the fold-and-clip closure is not a seal and the zip strips split after a few openings.
The part I got wrong for two years is that the enemy is not only the air that is in the container, it is the air that cycles through it every time I open it. A jar that gets opened twice a day is exchanging its whole headspace twice a day regardless of how well it seals in between. So the practical answer here has been decanting: the bulk stays in a properly sealed tin at the back of the cupboard and gets opened once a fortnight, and a small working jar on the shelf holds about a week's worth and is allowed to be opened constantly because the leaf in it will be gone before it matters.
Kept on the card
- A press-fit inner lid is worth more than any amount of decoration on the outside
- Clip-top glass seals well and protects nothing from light; keep it in a closed cupboard
- Decant a week's worth so the main store is opened a couple of times a month
- Fill jars as full as you can; the headspace is where the damage sits
The jar that went flat
The loss that made me take this seriously was two hundred grams of a spring-picked green that I had liked enough to buy a lot of. It went into a single-lid tin on the open shelf above the kettle in October 2023, which in hindsight is three mistakes stacked on top of each other: a poor seal, a humid room, and directly above the one appliance in the kitchen that produces steam several times a day.
I noticed in January. The cup had lost the sweetness at the front entirely and had a flat, slightly dusty quality that I first blamed on my water, then on the kettle, then on myself for brewing carelessly. What settled it was opening a small sealed sample of the same leaf that had been forgotten in a drawer and brewing them side by side. They were not the same tea any more. The sample from the drawer was what I remembered buying and the shelf tin was a tired shadow of it.
The leaf was not spoiled in any meaningful sense and I drank my way through it over the following months without complaint. It had simply stopped being worth the attention I was giving it, which is a quieter kind of waste and harder to notice.
Cold storage, and the pickings that need it most
The obvious answer to all of this is the refrigerator, and it works, with one serious condition attached. Leaf taken from a cold store into a room at twenty degrees will condense moisture on itself within a couple of minutes, and doing that repeatedly is worse than leaving it in a cupboard. So anything that goes cold has to go in portioned, sealed and forgotten, and must come out to reach room temperature fully sealed before it is opened. I give a jar four hours on the counter before I break the seal.
I only bother for one category: early spring green, bought in quantity, that I want to still be good in November. Those pickings carry the most aromatic material and lose it fastest, and the difference between a well kept one and a carelessly kept one at six months is not subtle. Anything picked later in the year, and anything with real oxidation behind it, keeps perfectly well in a good tin in a dark cupboard, and I have stopped complicating my life over it.
There is also a slow direction that is not decline. A heavier, more oxidised leaf I bought in 2022 and kept in a tin in the cupboard is better now than it was, rounder and less sharp, and the change was gradual enough that I only noticed by opening an old sealed sample. That is the same comparison that showed me the green had died, run the other way. Keeping a small sealed reference of anything you care about, and not touching it for a year, is the cheapest measuring instrument in this whole notebook.