Point your camera. Know the tea in two seconds.

The mystery tin problem

Almost every tea drinker owns one: a bag a friend brought back from a trip, a sample with a label in a language you cannot read, a tin refilled two years ago and never marked. You know it is tea. You do not know whether it wants 70 °C or 100 °C, one minute or five — and getting that wrong turns a gift into a bitter cup.

Teafinity's identification exists for exactly that moment. Take a photo of the dry leaf, the packaging, or even the brewed liquor, and the app returns the most likely match from its library, along with everything it knows about brewing it.

A name is not the useful part — the brewing plan is

Plenty of apps can tell you "that looks like a green tea". That answer does not help you at the kettle: gyokuro and Long Jing are both green teas, and brewing one like the other wastes it. Identification is only worth anything if it hands you the numbers next.

So a result opens the full tea profile: origin, flavour notes, caffeine in milligrams, best time of day, food pairings, and the complete Western and Gong Fu schedules. From there you can start the timer for that tea immediately, or save it into your collection to find again.

Honest about what it can and cannot see

Photo identification works best where there is something to see: whole loose leaf, a clear packaging shot, a distinctive shape like a rolled oolong pearl or a compressed pu-erh cake. It is much harder with fine powders, anonymous blends in unmarked bags, and tea bags that hide the leaf entirely.

Rather than hiding that, the app shows how confident it is in a result, and lets you correct it. Every correction is a tea you have named properly in your own collection — and if the tea genuinely is not in the library yet, Premium subscribers can request that we add it. Requests from readers are how a good part of the library grew.

The teas people scan most

Scans cluster in predictable places. Rolled oolongs and compressed pu-erh are the most distinctive shapes in the library and the most satisfying to identify. Japanese greens get photographed constantly, because sencha, gyokuro and kabusecha look alike in the tin while wanting very different water. And herbal blends get scanned because a handful of dried flowers, roots and berries tells you almost nothing about how long it should brew.

If you already know the category, you can skip the camera altogether: the type hubs on this site list every tea we carry, with that type's median temperature, time and ratio at the top of the page. That is usually the faster route when the real question is "how do I brew a white tea" rather than "what exactly is this".

What it costs, in plain words

Photo identification is a Premium feature: it runs on servers we pay for, and unlimited scanning is part of the subscription rather than the free tier. The free tier is still genuinely useful — 30 curated teas with complete brewing data, the brewing timer, favourites and daily insights, with no trial clock.

Premium is a 3-day free trial, then $29.99 a year or $3.99 a week. It includes unlimited identification, the full 176-tea library plus 80 seasonal blends, Gong Fu timers and tea requests. Billing is handled by Apple or Google, and you can cancel in two taps from your subscription settings.