[I’ve started drinking tea after reading A Hacker’s Guide to Tea, and I’m going to start posting reviews here because, well, maybe the world wants to know what I think.]

Fujian Jasmine Pearl, for lack of a better term, “chemically.” I made it for the first time and found its smell to be more like tea drenched in an artificial flavor devised in a PepsiCo™ lab by food scientists than actual tea. The taste was an improvement over the smell, but not so much that I’d actually like to make it again. I love the smell of tea as much as the next guy, but I want it to be fundamentally like tea, not the inside of a warehouse or a perfume.

What gives? I’m guessing that I got a bad batch or that its extreme price makes people like the tea. It’s like a monetary placebo effect. Dan Ariely describes how this works in chapters 9 and 10 of Predictably Irrational, which describe “The effect of expectations: Why the mind gets what it expects” and “The power of price: Why a 50-cent aspirin can do what a penny aspirin can’t.” Both chapters describe how we manage to think our way into liking things. If you want someone to love your product, charge more for it and convince them to buy it. Cue people citing Apple as an example. But you have to offer something aspirational about it; in the case of Adagio, they put Fujian Jasmine Pearl in their “masters” collection. There’s a little story about the tea. There are dozens of glowing reviews. None of them take the Coke-Pepsi challenge on it.