Tea shops in Seoul (recommendations please)

An onlne contact also recommended a shop called Ancient Futures that looks nice (online).  I'm in Yokohama, Japan now but will go to Seoul on Friday.  As for here I found an elusive Japanese black tea but I haven't tried it yet,  and bought some Japanese and Chinese teas.

This post was really about asking for leads but I'll update how finding Korean teas went.

I have a partial answer but I'm not so sure it's a good one.  We visited Insadong, a main art themed commercial district,  sort of like an old quarter, and I bought Korean black tea and a yellow tea.  Tasting will determine what I've got; it wasn't the kind of shop where they offer that, trying teas.

I don't have a great feeling about the search process, or by extension,  high hopes about the tea.  I may have bought quite decent tea by virtue of paying full retail (or a little over), or maybe it's mediocre tea I really overpaid for.  At any rate I now have bought so much tea and have spent enough that my wife has sort of had it (we visited  Yokohana, Japan first; same type of story there).

My mother asked me if Korea has any known good tea this week. She is a tea drinker, but I am not. I would like to send her some from Korea, but I don't if I should focus on buying tea from China or India. Can you give me your thoughts?

Thanks!

From China is the obvious answer, but I'll have more to say about korean teas in a couple weeks when I get caught up tasting.  What does she like in tea,  which types, what flavor elements?   Really preference means more than some objective quality level.  There's a lot of range in tea.  I'd be happy to ramble on but a narrowed starting point helps.

After discussing this topic with my mother, she said she enjoys herbal teas.

That's an unusual exception as tea enthusiasts go. They cakk them tisanes, not tea, although dictionaries disagree if it matters.  I'm on vacation now but there is a lot I can say about that since I went through an herb tea / tisane phase for about a decade.   There is one maker in particular you should know about, Alivita (from memory;  I'll look it up and add a link).

She really might want to try more teas made from a tea plant too.  I don't really know about the health benefits but lots are claimed, and the vairiety is great, a huge range of types and flavors.  I'll add more here later on both.

I'll start with an overview of results of looking for teas in Seoul.

I'll put more detail in a blog post (I write about tea), but I'll mention the basics of an answer to the question I asked myself, as promised. I didn't spend lots of time looking for tea so it wouldn't be a very complete answer.  There doesn't seem to be that much interest in tea or tea in Seoul on here but on the off chance this will ring a bell I'll still ramble on a bit.

I had the best luck wandering around Insadong, a tourist / art / traditional area. It would take a full day to really do that type of search justice but in a half an hour I found a few tea cafes and two shops selling loose tea (actually one was pu'er, compressed Chinese tea; close enough). I bought a Korean black and yellow tea, so I did find interesting types. The downside: I paid through the nose, the most I've ever paid for tea, $30 for 40 grams of tea for one, if I'm remembering right (one third that price or less is more standard, for decent tea).

I didn't go to any of the other places I'd mentioned because I didn't have time to spend on running down shops; just enough to go take a look (it was a family vacation, not about tea). Based on another recommendation I checked out an interesting traditional medicine market, but there was only a bit of loose tea being sold there, not the compressed disk teas I'd hoped to find (dok-cha). Here's a link about the Gyeongdong Market if you'd like to take a look, since it seemed a great place to buy all sorts of other things, like fresh ginseng:

http://visitkorea.or.kr/enu/SI/SI_EN_3_ … cid=982866

In summary, Koreans don't drink tea as they do in Japan or China, which explains the emphasis on herbal teas / tisanes there. In retrospect that makes sense; it's too far north to be ideal for tea production. Japan isn't much further South--the Southern parts; the north is at the same latitude--but obviously tea demand has to do with culture more than what can grow everywhere. Since the supply is limited and there is some demand the cost is high, and I saw teas selling for even more in a higher end grocery store. More than a dollar a gram for tea is a bit excessive, to me, but to put it in perspective it's still less than a Starbucks habit.

An online contact there said she buys tea in bulk at tea expos / trade conventions (and there is one in June; if anyone here is interested reply in this thread and I'll add the link). Or they also drink a lot of foreign tea, based on seeing it sold in different places.

About herbal teas (tisanes, to tea enthusiasts, but what's in a name really), I said I'd mention the name of one source, which also includes some reference information:

https://www.alvita.com/

Really what you are looking for is plain herbs / flowers / roots (whatever the tea is), with as little modification and as simple a bag as you can find, and that's essentially what they sell.  My favorite was always sage (right, like in stuffing) but floral versions or other herbs would make more sense to most, maybe.

The question is how to know which you like (or your mother likes in this case).  She may hate sage tea but love parsely tea, or vice-versa, or the same could be true of different roots, flowers, etc.  One person may only like single types and another only blends (it's nice to mix a few, once you get a feel for which you like with which). 

As far as health benefits go I'd be wary of putting too much stock in that, but at the same time there are lots of detailed claims floating around (that company makes them too), and the herbs have been used for their benefits for a long time, so there must be something to all that.  Hard to say what, or sort out individual claims.  My advice would be to not drink too much of any one, don't overdo it, and if you drink a lot of varied teas you should be fine as far as getting some benefits and avoiding risks (if the teas are effective it wouldn't just be positive, right, especially at high doses).

As with tea made from the tea plant the cost factor works in your favor; a package of 30 or so "tea bags" usually runs around what a cup of coffee costs.  It's possible to try a dozen types without really getting invested.  I'd be careful of additives in teas, not so much because they're dangerous but because the real thing tastes fine so no need to drink it with artificial sprays added. 

As a starting point you might look into what mainstream tea sellers are doing with herbs and blends, places like David's tea (sort of a Starbucks of tea, although Teavana really is the Starbucks of tea since Starbucks bought it).  You might also consider masala chai--it's tasty, and is black tea mixed with spices (ginger, cinamon, different things).  Of course you can buy a blended version or I've written a blog post on how to make it yourself (I'll not link to that here though; admins can be touchy on this site).