What is your Steepster tea rating system?

I like the simple 1* to 5* system and try to relate it to how I buy tea.

- 1* is awful and you’d never recommend it. Bad tea.
- 2* is ‘okay’, fine normal tea, but not a stand-out. (Probably wouldn’t choose to buy again).
- 3* is nice tea, you’d buy the same again and recommend it (for a good price).
- 4* is excellent tea which you’d pay a premium for
- 5* is the best tea which you’d pay any price to have again.

I try to keep my ‘daily drinker’ teas in the 3* range. 4* and 5* tea being stuff that I break out for occasions, guests or if I feel like a treat.

I kind of chunk the scale up into blocks of 10, and try to associate a simple term with each range. Like 70s is “good” for me, while 80s is “great”. That way I can fit the tea into a general block and then after that decide where I think it should fall within that 10 points. Otherwise it’s kind of overwhelming to decide on a number.

I also generally don’t use every number, like I’ll rate things at a 70, 72, 75, 78, or 80 but not more granular than that.

It’s also specific to each person, so my ratings might overall be higher than someone else’s just because of how I think about the scale. I will say mine probably tend to be high.

(there’s also some more info about the “blocks” that I use in my profile!)

I see my ratings as like school grades (in America anyway): below 65 and it’s generally a fail. haha. So I also rarely rate anything below 65, definitely not 50.

Well, I don’t have many tea reviews on steepster yet, but when I review tea for myself, or for a blog, if I wanna do it “specificaly” i do it this way:

1. Divide the ratin in 4 categories, each one having 10 possible point(ie. Dry Leaf smell: x/10)
2. I add all points together and calculate as a percentage(so divide 100 with amount of possible points and multiply with number of total points I gave the tea) and that is my grade out of a 100.
3. I would say everything above 65 would be something I could drink daily and anythig under that I wouldn’t pick up again (with exceptions of course)

Haha I’m sorry if sounds overdone, it’s the way I enjoy doing it.