Moychay

Moychay describes itself as an international tea company headquartered in Amsterdam, and Rozengracht 92H is its tea house in the city. The company says it sources directly from China, Japan, Georgia, Vietnam and other countries, that its founder, Sergey Shevelev, spends up to half of each year travelling through tea regions, and that it also produces its own tea in Georgia and Thailand. Everything sold on the website can be smelled, seen and bought at the club, and tea guides are on hand to help with the choice.

The house is more than a shop. There is a tea bar with drinks to stay or take away, including a matcha drink the house calls the Matchaccino, and a room set up like an oriental living room. On the second floor are three tea ceremony rooms, Japanese, Chinese and Taiwanese, each for up to nine guests, booked for a guided Ping Cha tasting or a Gong Fu Cha ceremony of about an hour and a half. The shop suggests reserving a table at weekends.

The catalogue is deep, and many teas come as a 7 g sample next to a larger pack: a deeply baked Tie Guanyin from Sanming in 7 or 60 g, a White Monkey green from Nanping in 7 or 50 g, a Mi Xiang honey-fragrance tea from Datian in 7 or 45 g. Many product pages list origin, altitude and gaiwan parameters. The teaware collection runs to more than a thousand items, from cups under one euro to antique pieces above a thousand, and the house calls itself a gallery as much as a shop.