Any and all are more than welcome to jump in and chat in this thread... it wasn't intended to be just me. Hijack away like you're all DB Coopers!
As to getting more tea education, the best thing is to taste your way through as many teas as you can. The zillion subvarieties of the Camelia Sinensis plant produce an amazing range of flavors... perhaps even broader than all of the herbal concoctions out there that also call themselves "tea". A long time ago Adagio Tea did a "Tea Horizons" monthly tea club where they'd send 4 or 5 little samples of tea... they sent some really interesting and off the wall stuff. It was a fantastic way to broaden the palate and get an understanding of all the things tea can do. Since that isn't a thing anymore, I still would recommend sampling broadly, rather than buying quarter pounds of a few things. Adagio's ordering system still does sample sizes... though they're not nearly as good a deal as the old club used to be.
Upton Tea is another spot with a very wide range of teas that also does sample sizes in the same size range as what I'm working through in this thread... enough to make 2 or 3 infusion sets. If you look in this forum, you'll spot other tea tasting threads where tea merchants like Norbu have been kind enough to spot a few of us samples in return for a good online discussion of the teas... They'd certainly be worth checking out.
Amazon seems less fruitful, I'd say. Amazon seems to deal in mass marketed brands, and for tea, being an annual crop with variations like vintages of wine, there's usually not enough of anything particularly interesting to make it worth investing in serious branding. So what you're likely to find there is less likely to be interesting.
This particular set of samples came from exploring the tea offerings on Aliexpress, the direct to consumer arm of Alibaba, the giant Chinese ecommerce entity that has been in the news (and from which I've also been ordering things like LED light strips and wi-fi connected electrical switches). The thought to look there came upon me when I heard somebody say the old aphorism "what does that have to do with the price of tea in China?" And it struck me that looking in China for tea was an eminently sensible thing to do and the internet made it possible... and so this thread came to be.
As you'll have observed upthread, some teas keep on going and going... a really good oolong or a pu erh can make 2+ liters of tea from a 2-3 gram dose of leaf. That is usually a property of Chinese made teas, most notably greens and oolongs... Indian made teas are almost all black, and most black teas seem to be good for 1 or maybe 2 steepings most of the time. So when you go shopping for samples, 6-10 grams of tea is usually enough for you to get a sense of whether the particular tea and the style are to your liking.
If you happen to live someplace with a real live tea shop, I heartily advise you to pay them a visit. I have very fond memories of going into Philadelphia in the late 1990s to visit the House of Tea and its character of a proprietor, Nathaniel Lit... he was polymath sort of guy... Architect, circus clown, pastry chef, married into some dynastic money... a guy with lots of great stories to tell, and somebody who'd say "You wanna smell something that will knock your socks off?"... and produce a great tin of some tea I'd never heard of before, the fragrance of which would be irresistible. And I'd end up leaving shocked at the idea that I'd just spent $15 or $20 per ounce for some tea... but they were worth it.
