Hi, after reading this thread I felt the overall nature of responses were egregious enough to single-handedly compel me to write a response.
I'd consider myself of moderate but above average experience in the tea world (Chinese/Taiwanese teas specifically) from what I typically see even in communities like this, I've browsed various tea related forums and resources for a while but never specifically engaged or paid too much attention to brand or dealer related supremacy. I don't know what the most highly regarded general (or specific) sources for tea here are, but I've bought at minimum a few hundred dollars worth from Crimson Lotus, Yunnan Sourcing, Taiwan Sourcing, Eco-cha, What-cha, Kuura, Teavivre and of course, Mei Leaf. Again I'm not aware of which vendors here are recommended but elsewhere they're either highly regarded or consistently at least acknowledged to sell a variety of good teas at fair prices. My most used vendor is easily YS and I enjoy Scott's video style much more than ML as well.
Personally I don't particularly enjoy Mei Leafs videos although think Don is overall a good source of information to beginners and has a much better sense for tasting and appreciating quality of teas than most vendors. Scott from YS for example I would consider to have an excellent sense for puerh and tea in general however when it comes to other varietals there are a lot of low quality, dud teas advertised as "imperial grade" such as their silver needles or jin jun mei sold in his store. I will say and with emphasis however, that the vast majority of Mei Leaf teas I tried (about half the collection via samplers) had distinctiveness, reasonable quality leaves and overall met the standards of other constantly acknowledged vendors. In fact I would say in general that they were above average standards and in some examples such as their various silver needle offerings, HUGELY exceeded the level I have experienced at the majority of highly regarded vendors. Even in terms of puerh, I can't say a single one of Mei Leafs offerings were below par or bad teas, I can't say the same even for all the puerh specific vendors I've bought from. They didn't meet the pinnacle standards Don markets his teas as either, but quite frankly I don't care and there is no reason to if the tea is good and as advertised. One poster mentions their dong ding not being authentic as is acknowledged on their website as a somewhat similarly processed tea from Alishan, I've had a lot of dong ding and regardless of authenticity I can't say I've had one more enjoyable than the Mei Leaf even if it doesn't necessarily taste specifically of one either. The price is very high all things considered, but if the tea is enjoyable I can't say I'd recommend against someone trying a sampler.
Are they fairly priced? If you consider that the production value of their Youtube videos, having a storefront in London and coming from there to begin with, I would say they still are somewhat overpriced, however a variety of their teas are distinct enough to warrant a purchase regardless. If we disregard their location, marketing and engagement on Youtube then no there are preferable vendors in general. As someone else rationally mentioned, if you live on the other side of the world, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to buy from Mei Leaf. They do have a few examples of teas that I personally would buy if I lived in the vicinity however. For a beginner, I would recommend they try samples from a wide variety of vendors to develop their palate and get a grasp of how to judge quality. Against Mei Leaf, I do think the claim in question about 1000 year old teas is absolutely absurd but they seem to have moved away from that and my experience with their puerhs has been largely very positive. Even on price I think it fares well with other vendors in this area.
Now to the responses in this thread.. to put it simply, a large complaint of Mei Leaf here is that they are overly focused on marketing largely for the sake of profiting off a low information segment of the market. Well the majority of posts from anti-Mei Leaf users here say LITERALLY NOTHING about the teas, don't reflect proof they've ever tried the teas or resort to outlandish, factually incorrect statements to criticise them. They boil down to empty, overly emotional criticism with zero factual basis. In other words, THEY'RE PURE MARKETING. As someone with a reasonably solid grounding in experience with tea, what I feel like I am looking at here is a cult that is more interested in marketing their own ideology than giving honest information about tea. I came to this forum to find information on some potential vendors for Japanese and Korean tea which I am less knowledgeable about and also to find some good vendors for silver needles. The low information, overly emotional and often thoughtless comments I see here from some posters makes me consider that most people here are either liars or know less than I do.
For example, an early ridiculous comment and nonsensical criticism from one poster:
The bizarre terms like "Young Gushu" ( Young Ancient Tree ...I'm not a native Eng. speaker , but I believe those two terms are contradictory )
I'll give him the benefit of the doubt that he isn't a native English speaker, but its blatantly obvious it refers to a young, or newly pressed cake of puerh produced from old arbor. Hence "young gushu". For example, a tea is harvested and pressed in 2019 from trees that are 300 years old is a young gushu. New production, old trees. Yet this poster goes on a long winded rant trying to suggest that Mei Leaf is being dishonest. The worst part is that this terminology is used so often that it makes me wonder how knowledgeable they actually are themselves. I have no idea if they're either deliberately playing dumb to make Mei Leaf look bad to OP who is obviously a beginner, if he doesn't know what young sheng is or if his understanding of English is worse than it seems. Either way, its such a sad, silly thing to watch someone deliberately misinterpret something obvious, making themselves look clueless yet turn it into an insult against someone else.
They spend multiple paragraphs clearly trying to emphasise that Mei Leaf are salesmen selling mediocre tea at a high margin, not a serious vendor yet at the same time acknowledge they've never tried the tea. How is this remotely rational?
Some other ridiculous comments:
Their teas are relatively expensive considering most taste like cardboard.
Clearly from someone who has never had their tea or has the tea tasting palate of a dog. As is typical in this thread, the person in question doesn't mention or prove any direct experience with their teas. Just a blatantly hyperbolic comment based on seemingly nothing.
From Chadrinkincat:
Chadrinkincat wrote: ↑Sat Jul 06, 2019 4:59 pm
+1 for all the negative feedback.
Again, absolutely no actual reference to a specific tea or even their tea in general. Just an arbitrary negative comment that doesn't even make it appear they've had a Mei Leaf tea. A pattern across this thread.
And the most ridiculous:
What’s the harm in drinking mediocre or bad teas, you might ask?
Well, they can make you ill or at least feel ill. I recently felt sick from a bad sample of tea. It was so bad I put a serious pause on my tea drinking.
One person here mentioned the catch in the throat commonly associated with improper pesticide applications after drinking a tea from ML.
A friend of mine died last year of stomach cancer and I wonder if it was because she had to sample bad teas to curate high quality teas.
Bad teas make you feel bad. It’s the same with cheap wines, just ask your sommelier, chef.
Yes that's right, apparently on this forum we have posters who quite literally will reference stomach cancer in a thread about Mei Leaf and implicitly suggest they could do the same for you, that they are ridden with pesticides (again, zero proof) and that they could make you feel sick. This is quite frankly, flippant defamation from someone who I suspect hasn't even tried their tea. Imagine complaining about "sleazy marketing practices" in the same post as implying that Mei Leaf could give you stomach cancer or even that the tea will make you "feel bad". There's no reason to trust a single thing a poster like this writes. Hyperbolic, overly emotional, shill nonsense.
Thank God Bok as seemingly the only rational poster here claims the following:
Bok wrote: ↑Sat Jul 06, 2019 1:01 am
If you want to go about it in the most objective way:
Get the same kind of teas in similar pricing from different vendors and try them side by side in identical porcelain gaiwans/or competition cupping sets.
That is the only way to be sure.
Again, I wasn't even going to create an account on this forum but the behaviour and comments from some of the posters are just so utterly off the rails and dishonest that I felt a need to. A lot of people here making themselves look bad and reflecting poorly on the forum. I haven't bought from Mei Leaf in a long while and they wouldn't be the first place I'd recommend for high end teas, but I would absolutely say that the idea of buying a variety of samplers to compare among various vendors would be an educational and enjoyable experience. I'm interested to hear if OP ever ended up trying them.
But hey, maybe I'm wrong and everyone here bashing Mei Leaf are aristocratic multi-millionaires daily drinking new village Bing Dao, Lao Ban Zhang direct from the farmer and top grade west lake longjing, while I'm just an impoverished pleb with low grade tastes drinking cheap, crappy tea. Either that or a lot of elitists who make comments on tea they've never had here. Who knows.