About Timberline Steep
One person, one kitchen, one protocol. This page explains who is writing, how the site pays for itself, and what you can reasonably trust here.
The owner
Hello — I'm Mary Knight
I have been drinking loose-leaf tea for about twenty-five years and writing about it seriously since 2019, from a converted back room of our house on Timberbrook Lane in Pagosa Springs, Colorado.
Before this I spent nineteen years in quality assurance for a food-packaging company in Durango, which is a less romantic background than most tea writers claim and considerably more useful. My job was designing repeatable tests and refusing to accept results that could not be reproduced. That habit is the whole methodology of this site.
Timberline Steep started as a spreadsheet. I kept buying tea that arrived tasting nothing like the description, and I wanted to know whether the problem was the tea, the water or me. Once the spreadsheet passed a hundred rows, it seemed worth publishing.
- Based inPagosa Springs, Colorado — 7,126 ft
- Publishing sinceMarch 2019
- Teas cupped184 and counting
- Day jobThis is it, part-time, since 2023
How this site is funded
Plainly, so there is no confusion
Affiliate commissions
When a review recommends a tea, we link to a retailer. If you buy through that link the retailer may pay us a small commission at no additional cost to you. This is the main way the site is funded.
Nothing else, currently
No sponsored posts, no display advertising networks, no paid rankings, no newsletter sponsorships, no fees from brands for coverage of any kind.
Why it stays separate
Scores are finalised and written before affiliate links are added. If a tea scores poorly, the review says so and the link stays — the point of a review is that it can say no.
Timeline
Seven years, briefly
The spreadsheet becomes a website
Eleven teas, a borrowed camera and a domain bought on a Sunday. The first review took four days to write and is still online, lightly corrected.
The protocol is formalised
Blind re-cupping is added after I realised I had scored the same Assam 84 and 91 six months apart. Every score since then involves a second, unlabelled session.
Water chemistry gets logged
A TDS meter joins the setup. Recording hardness explained several results that had made no sense, particularly among the green teas.
Annual re-testing
Every scored tea now gets re-cupped each season, because harvests move and a five-year-old score is a historical document rather than a recommendation.
What we will not do
The short list
- We will not score a tea we did not buy ourselves
- We will not take payment for a review, a ranking or a position on a list
- We will not remove a negative review because a brand asked
- We will not publish a health claim we cannot source
- We will not sell, rent or trade your personal information — see the privacy policy