How to track every tea you've tried (5 methods compared)

By Philipp · Published June 10, 2026

You are three tabs deep on some vendor's site and you remember a tea. The good one. Smelled like apricots and warm hay, and the second steep was better than the first. You loved it. And you cannot remember what it was called, who sold it, or how you brewed it. That is the moment you want a system.

So the honest starting point is admitting why you bother. Not for the aesthetic. You track tea so you can buy the good one again, skip the one that let you down, and stop paying twice for the same oolong because past-you forgot it was already in the cupboard. (I have done this. More than once.)

Five ways to do it, from doing nothing up to a dedicated app. Each one works for somebody, and each one breaks somewhere.

Method 1: memory (also known as nothing)

Who it suits: people who drink the same two or three teas on repeat and never stray. If your whole tea life is one breakfast blend and one chamomile, your brain is a perfectly good database.

Where it breaks: the second you get curious. Buy from a new vendor, accept samples, work through fifteen unmarked teas from an advent calendar, and memory falls apart fast. Flavor is slippery. You will swear you remember a tea and then confidently rebuy the wrong one. Memory also stores zero numbers, so the temperature and steep time that made it sing are gone the moment the cup is empty.

This is the baseline everything else improves on. Most people are here and quietly annoyed about it.

Method 2: a paper notebook

Who it suits: people who like the ritual of writing, who already journal, who want tea to stay analog and slow. A notebook by the kettle is lovely. There are pre-printed tea tasting journals on Amazon and Etsy with tidy fields for name, vendor, type, rating and notes, and they make the habit easy to start.

Where it breaks: paper cannot be searched, sorted or counted. You can write down forty teas and still not answer "which Darjeelings did I rate above an 8" without flipping every page. It does not come to the shop with you unless you remember to bring it. And it never does anything with what you wrote. A notebook is a beautiful read-only archive. Six months in, that is its whole personality.

I used a notebook for ages. It was honestly fine. It just never told me anything back.

Method 3: a spreadsheet

Who it suits: the organized. A Google Sheet costs nothing, syncs to your phone, and lets you make columns for whatever you care about: name, vendor, type, price, temperature, steep, rating, "would rebuy". You can sort by rating, filter by type, and finally answer the Darjeeling question.

Where it breaks: a spreadsheet does exactly what you tell it and not one thing more. You build it, you maintain it, and you stop logging the day it starts to feel like a chore. No timer, no flavor structure, no nudge. And the math is on you. The sheet stores the numbers but it will never notice that your best-rated sessions of one green all cluster around 80 degrees and a short steep. That pattern is sitting right there in your own data and the spreadsheet will never mention it.

Method 4: Airtable or Notion

Who it suits: the spreadsheet person who wants it to look nice and behave like a small app. There are ready-made tea tracker templates in the Airtable universe, and Notion people build setups with photo galleries, tags and rating views. You get database power plus a gallery layout, on phone and desktop.

Where it breaks: it is still a database you have to design and care for. The templates get you started, but the moment you want something they did not include you are back to building. Same as the spreadsheet, none of it brews. No timer, no structured flavor model, no analysis. It looks like a product but it is furniture you assembled, and it asks for upkeep the busy months will not give it.

Method 5: a dedicated tea app

Who it suits: people who taste a lot of different teas and want the logging to be quick and the remembering to be automatic. This is the category built for exactly this problem. The fields are already there. There is usually a timer, a structured way to record flavor instead of groping for adjectives, ratings, photos and a collection view. On the app-store side, MyTeaPal is the well-known pick: a free iOS and Android app with a timer, journal, per-infusion notes and a community, and it is genuinely good at what it does.

Where the category used to break is that an app is only as good as how little it nags you and how much it gives back. A logger that just stores your notes is a prettier notebook. The point of going digital is that the tool should remember, and then do something with what you fed it.

Which is the idea behind Tealytics. It is a tea notebook that does the math. It runs in your browser and installs from there, so there is no app-store download and nothing to update, and the same journal is on your phone and your laptop. The free tier covers the actual job: log every session and every infusion, record flavor across twelve attributes and see it as a radar per tea, run the steep timer, rate things, and watch your Leaf Ledger fill up like a passport of every tea type you have tried. Inventory tracking even estimates the days until a tea runs out, so you reorder the good one before it is gone instead of six months too late.

The math part is the bit the other four methods cannot touch. After about five rated sessions of a tea, Tealytics reads your own logs and surfaces the temperature, steep and ratio that produced your best cups. The other four methods store that information. This one uses it.

The five methods at a glance

So which method should you actually use

If you drink the same two teas forever, your memory is fine and this post was not for you. Love the ritual and never need to search? Get a nice notebook. The column-thinkers who enjoy the upkeep will get years out of a spreadsheet or Airtable.

But if you taste widely, hate losing the good ones, and want the tool to hand patterns back to you instead of just storing notes, a dedicated app is the only option that both remembers and does the math. Pick the app-store route with MyTeaPal, or the web route with Tealytics if you would rather not download anything and want the stats to be the point. The full roundup of tea tracking apps covers the rest if you want to compare.

Frequently asked questions

What is the best way to keep track of teas you have tried?

The best method is the one you will actually keep up with. For a handful of teas, a notebook or a Google Sheet is plenty. Once you are tasting widely and want to search your notes, compare ratings and brew each tea better over time, a dedicated tea app saves the most effort because the structure and the timer are already built in.

Is there an app to track tea?

Yes, a few. MyTeaPal is a free iOS and Android app with a timer, journal and community. Tealytics is web-based, so it installs from your browser with no app-store download and works the same on phone and laptop. Its free tier covers full session and infusion logging, flavor notes, ratings and collection tracking, and it reads your logs to suggest your best brewing settings.

Can I track tea in a spreadsheet?

Absolutely. A Google Sheet or Airtable base with columns for name, vendor, type, temperature, steep time, rating and tasting notes works well and costs nothing. The trade-off is that you build and maintain it yourself, there is no timer, and it will not analyze your data for you. It stores the numbers but it will not spot the patterns in them.

What should I record about each tea?

At minimum: name, vendor and type, so you can rebuy it. Then a rating, so past-you can warn future-you. After that, brewing settings (temperature, steep time, leaf-to-water ratio) and a few honest flavor notes are what turn a list into something useful. If you brew gongfu style, logging each infusion separately is worth the extra taps.