Steepster History

Here’s the rundown:

Founding: Steepster launched in March 2009, built by a team called Disrupto — three friends in New York City (Jack, Mike, and Jason). It launched in March 2009 by Disrupto, a team of three friends working in New York City. They ran it out of their apartments and various NYC tea cafés (Radiance Tea & Books, Tea Spot, Sanctuary T) before the first version launched in March. It became a community-driven tea database — users log tasting notes, ratings, and “tealogs” for teas across thousands of vendors.

Ownership change: By around 2023–2024, the two remaining original founders (Jason and Mike) were burned out — they’d been personally covering the site’s running costs, but their careers pulled them elsewhere and it became financially and time-wise unsustainable. Rather than shut it down, they announced Steepster would be handed over to the people behind Adagio Teas, effective July 15th, citing Adagio’s history running other independent tea community properties (TeaMuse, TeaMap, TeaCritic, TeaChat).

Current owner: Adagio Teas — a New Jersey-based specialty tea retailer. Adagio was founded in 1999 by Sofya Kreymerman and her sons Michael and Ilya Cramer, starting out of the family’s basement. Michael Cramer is the current founder/CEO. Adagio has since expanded well beyond tea — it added a coffee division (Lardera Coffee Roasters) in 2021, launched an herb/spice shop called Selefina in 2022, and now operates out of an 80,000 m² facility in East Rutherford, NJ as of 2025 (note: source figures are in square feet, converting: ~7,430 m²).

Site reputation now: Mixed. Facebook comments and community threads suggest the site has been somewhat neglected technically since the handover — one recent Facebook comment noted it “kinda fell off the face of the earth”. There’s also been longstanding community skepticism about a tea retailer (Adagio) owning what’s meant to be an independent ratings platform — one commenter flagged the ethics of a tea company taking over a self-moderated ratings site, referencing an earlier controversy around Adagio’s TeaChat forum.

So: independent hobby project (2009) → founder burnout → acquired by a commercial tea company (Adagio) that still runs it today, alongside its own retail business.