My answer for most speciality coffee shops is:
Probably fewer than you think.
Six excellent teas will usually serve you far better than fifteen average ones.
There’s a practical reason for that.
Every additional tea means another product to store, another SKU to manage, another line to reorder and potentially another tea slowly losing freshness while it sits on the shelf.
More importantly, customers can find huge menus surprisingly difficult.
Give someone five or six genuinely different options and they can make a decision quite easily. Give them twenty-five and suddenly choosing a cup of tea starts to feel like homework.
For most small speciality coffee shops, I would generally recommend somewhere between five and eight traditional teas, depending on the type of customer you serve.
A really strong starting six could be:
English Breakfast Tea
Earl of Grey
Sencha Green
Mojito Mint
Red Berry Burst Infusion
Rhubarb Rooibos
From there, you might add one more specialist tea if you feel your customers would appreciate it, perhaps Jade Oolong or White Peony.
That is already a really credible tea menu.
I would then treat matcha, chai and hojicha as their own café drinks rather than simply adding them into the traditional tea count.
There are obviously places where a larger range makes sense. A hotel, destination café or afternoon-tea venue might want to offer more choice because tea forms a bigger part of the overall experience.
But for an everyday speciality coffee shop, simplicity is incredibly valuable.
It makes staff training easier.
It makes stock control easier.
And it allows you to spend your money on better tea rather than spreading the budget across endless lines.
There is another advantage too.
When you have a smaller menu, every tea can have a story.
Your breakfast tea doesn’t have to be just “English Breakfast”. It can become your house tea.
Your green tea doesn’t have to be simply “green tea”. You can tell customers it is Japanese Sencha and explain what makes it different.
That’s when tea starts to feel much more like speciality coffee.
Provenance. Flavour. Preparation. Character.
I would always rather see six teas that a barista genuinely understands than twenty that they can’t tell you anything about.