Tea is one of the fastest-growing beverage categories today, and Jesse Appell is along for the ride.

Not long ago, in a simpler time, I wrote something like a tea manifesto here in the pages of TASTE titled “What If You Actually Cared About Tea?” Professionally, I’m a generalist—I write about food and restaurants and wine and nonalcoholic beer and coffee and cocktails and internet recipe personalities and occasionally the Zodiac Killer—but there’s this special place deep in my heart for tea, which also happens to be one of the fastest-growing beverage consumption categories in America today. The gap between the tea I grew up drinking—Lipton bags of indeterminate age—and the tea I’m able to drink now is truly unfathomable. And that article from May 2023 is probably the TASTE story I hear from readers about the most even now, nearly two years later.

As I continue steeping and slurping and ritualistically saturating my brain in tea on a daily basis, I’ve become increasingly convinced of the deep pleasure, endless utility, and unbridled fun of tea subscription clubs. Tea is hyper-seasonal; the tea you want to drink in October is not the tea you want to drink in July, due to growing and picking cycles at the tea leaves’ point of origin. Tea clubs scratch that itch by keeping your cupboard full of exactly what you want to be drinking at any given moment, month by month: light, cooling green teas in the summer, roasted tieguanyins in the autumn, warming shou pu’er in the winter, and crisp white teas with surprising depth and complexity for spring (these are a few of my favorite things). These clubs are also a direct pipeline to an appreciation of the worldwide culture of tea, which is vast and can feel understandably intimidating if your access as an American has been limited for much of your life.

We are living in the golden age of tea clubs—and for tea content online. Unique in the world of tea clubs is Jesse’s Teahouse, the online wing of digital content creator and stand-up comedian Jesse Appell’s world. Originally from Boston and a graduate of Brandeis University, Appell earned a Fulbright fellowship to study Chinese comedy in the mid-2010s, then found himself embarking on an unlikely career as a bilingual stand-up comedian. He appeared frequently at comedy clubs and on Chinese television, and he built a following on Chinese social media through videos that gently satirized both US and Chinese culture from the perspective of a respectful outsider, juxtaposing Appell’s impressive Chinese language fluency with his corporeal reality as a skinny Jewish kid from Boston.

He also fell in love with tea, an osmosis of sorts resulting from his living and working in Beijing for the better part of a decade, studying with a Chinese language comedy instructor and helping run a comedy club. He landed back in America amid the COVID pandemic and brought his love for tea with him, fusing his social media know-how and performance chops with a deep reverence for the culture and flavors of Chinese tea. The result is Jesse’s Teahouse, an omni-media TikTok–YouTube–Instagram presence with more than one million combined followers across platforms—by far the largest audience for any English-language tea content worldwide.

We are living in the golden age of tea clubs—and for tea content online.

“A lot of people just have no idea about the depth of tea culture,” Appell tells me, “and so educational content is what I’m doing first and foremost.” His channels have a diaristic quality—he posts videos every day, sometimes going deep on a particular style of tea or brewing experiments, other times hanging out with tea lovers or making mobile gongfu (a style of traditional Chinese tea preparation) in unlikely places, from the top of a mountain in China to the gondolas of Venice. But the most interesting thing about what he’s doing is the integration of an online store through which Appell and his small multinational team source and sell high-quality teas, ceramics, and even tea pets (little ceramic totems upon which rinse water should be poured as part of the teamaking process).

If Appell’s content demystifies tea culture, then his tea club is like a front-row seat to really enjoy the show. Each $58 subscription box contains three teas and includes the option to add in a themed ceramic cup and tea pet to complete the set. Appell sources all of it—the teas as well as the ceramics—via connections back in China. “We don’t drop-ship anything,” he tells me, alluding to the common direct-to-consumer practice. “We source, we design, and we’re making a real brand out of this.” Some 1,600 subscribers are currently signed up for the club (myself included), and it’s been great fun drinking through the included options, from white teas to raw pu’ers to red teas and tea resins.

“Once people try good tea, they realize what they’ve been missing out on,” Appell says. “It’s like you’ve been eating Wonder Bread your whole life, and then you go to a great bakery.” I could not possibly agree more, and I would expect nothing less from Appell, whose eloquence and creativity as a communicator have helped earn him a place as one of the leading English-language tea voices in the world today. Moreover, I’m convinced that tea clubs like the one he offers are the very best way to plunge yourself into the fast-moving waters of tea appreciation and consumption. Here are a few of my favorites:

• Jesse’s Teahouse
  Expect a package of several teas each quarter starting at $58, sourced from China via Jesse Appell and his team. For a few bucks more, you can add on a ceramic cup and tea pet to help build up your home tea practice. I strongly recommend you do this—the ceramics are delightful. This is the perfect club to suggest for a tea drinker who is just getting started, but there’s something here for everyone.
• White2Tea
  Into the deeper end of Chinese teas, with sourcing and blending produced by this company based in Yunnan. White2Tea’s artful tea wraps and deep bench of products make it a leader in the online tea space. Its monthly club is an adventure: sometimes you’ll receive a dozen little samples of some obscure tea style, other months an entire tea cake of coveted pu’er, always accompanied by an informative and personal note on sourcing practices and brewing recommendations. This club, more than any other, has deeply impacted me as a tea-drinking human.
• Kettl Tea
  America’s premiere Japanese tea purveyor offers a monthly club featuring curated options that include matcha, hojicha, and rarities. For lovers of Japanese tea, this is your destination.
• Wuyi Origin
  Hyper-focused on the world of Wuyi teas, a style of oolong also sometimes called “rock tea,” each one is roasted with an uncommon degree of intentionality. These teas bring to my mind the wines of Burgundy: mineral-driven and obsessively terroir-focused, sometimes big and bold, other times light and ethereal, and always more to try.
• Tea Runners
  A customizable box subscription that offers a broad range of options for every sort of tea drinker, including herbalists. You can go deep here on serious Chinese teas or just up your game with a high-end English Breakfast option. If you’re early in your tea journey, Tea Runners meets you where you’re at, with options that will surprise you and expand your understanding along the way.