Hello,
In the lower part of the index page for my tea pages at
http://hompi.sogang.ac.kr/anthony/kortea.htm I do mention one Korean
tea store and tea-room in LA, Chasaengwon, run by the daughter of a
well-known Korean tea-producer. Other major online American tea stores
do sometimes offer Korean teas but of course, since I am on the spot
here in Korea, it is not a question that I spend much time with. I
believe that certain Korean food stores across the US sometimes stock
tea, if they have enough customers asking for it. Usually Sullok tea,
I expect.

As Dominic says, most ordinary Koreans are not into green tea at all.
The tea revival of the 1970s and 80s has had some impact but on the
whole Koreans drink coffee, or those other kinds of fruit or herbal
'tea' that owe nothing to camellia sinensis. The closest they come is
tea bags of 'green tea' but often they prefer those where the tea is
blended with roasted rice husks, giving a sweeter taste. The tea-
drinking situation in Korea is totally unlike that of Japan, where you
get served green tea everywhere for free before you order your cup of
green tea.

When tea-drying emerged from the temples and first became a commercial
activity in the 1970s in the Hwagye Valley region of Hadong county, in
Jiri Mountain, the target market was either rich Koreans or Japanese
tourists, so the prices were fixed sky-high. In recent years, the
women who do the tea-picking in April-May have a far more realistic
awareness of the payment they ought to receive for such arduous work
(the best tea fields are often on precipitous slopes and the bushes
are planted in haphazard arrangements, not in the tidy Japanese-style
hedges visible at Boseong or in Jeju Island). That means that the cost
of a kilogram of freshly picked leaves from a good spot is bound to be
very high (few can pick more than about 2 kilograms in a day). Since
one kilogram of green leaves produces 100 grams of tea . . . but there
are some ridiculous prices being demanded (and paid!) at the start of
the season in April, with 50 grams of some 'famous' makers' tea
selling for more than a thousand dollars. Some people have far too
much money!

Finally (already too long) there is all the difference in the world
between a commercially harvested and marketed tea which will have been
dried by hot air in a revolving cylinder as in Japan and Taiwan, and
the tea that I describe in my pages and book, that is dried in the way
taught by the Buddhist monks, being turned, rubbed and rolled entirely
by hand while being dried in a cauldron over a wood fire. It takes
hours of meticulous work to produce a couple of hundred grams, and the
old women who know exactly when to do what are gradually disappearing
from the face of the earth.

Finally, I would add that, yes, the Korean green tea produced by this
process is in fact very slightly oxidized (fermented) so that it does
not have the 'grassy' taste we find in much Japanese tea, and produces
a lightly yellow brew which can be intensely perfumed, especially if
the water is not too hot.

An Sonjae / Brother Anthony