The essence of Peet's tea starts in the field and ends in your cup.

The tea plant (camellia sinensis) grows best in a humid tropical or subtropical climate with plenty of rain. Areas that are well-drained, with a high-acidity sandy loam tend to produce the best teas. Higher elevations also yield better quality, perhaps because the evening coolness causes the leaves to grow more slowly, concentrating their flavor.

There are two important subspecies of the tea plant, the China type and the Assam type. The China type is grown in China, Taiwan, Japan, and parts of Darjeeling, and produces smaller leaves with a softer flavor. The indigenous Assam type is grown in India, Sri Lanka, and throughout the rest of the tea-producing world, producing larger leaves with more strength. Within each subspecies, there are dozens of local varietals created by generations of seed propogation and "clonal" planting using leaf cuttings.

For good quality teas, only the newest growth (two leaves and a bud) is plucked by hand; this process is called "fine plucking." "Coarse plucking" describes the practice of taking three or four leaves with the bud, and while the yield at the end of the day is much higher, the quality is much poorer. As any home gardener knows, repeated tip pinching promotes new growth, so the bushes produce multiple pluckings throughout the year - as few as three in climates with distinct seasonal variability to twelve or more in tropical regions. Raw leaf quality varies greatly with the seasons, and while a given estate may produce dozens of lots of tea each year, only a handful of these may have great flavor.

A typical tea bush may produce over a thousand leaves each year, a seemingly large number until one realizes that a single pound of fully processed tea may contain two to three thousand leaves.