Spice & Tea Merchants of McKinney

The McKinney store sits at 110 S Tennessee Street, just off the old courthouse square in the historic downtown, in a building the McKinney Chamber of Commerce named its Historic Preservation Project of the Year. It belongs to a house that started in Saugatuck, Michigan, in 2003 and now has stores in a dozen states. The format is deliberately old-fashioned: spice blends mixed by hand while customers watch, in what the company itself calls an old-world apothecary layout.

The tea side is larger than the shopfront suggests. The catalogue splits loose leaf into black, oolong, green, matcha, white and purple, fruit and herb tisanes, rooibos, mate and flowering buds, and the black list alone runs to sixty products, the green to thirty-three and the oolong to fifteen. Every one of them is sold in the same three bag sizes, one, four and eight ounces, each priced on its own rather than scaled from a base price.

Two things are worth knowing before you go. Product pages carry the ingredient list, a caffeine descriptor and brewing instructions, which is more than most spice shops bother with, and the same page for an organic Earl Grey names only Chinese black tea and bergamot oil. But the web store is the group's, run from Illinois, and the company states plainly that some online products are not in the shops and some shop products are not online. Treat the catalogue as a guide to the shelf, not a mirror of it.