Free Shopify theme · Food & Beverage · Editorial
Ninth Steep
An indigo and cream storefront for a two person tea shop that presses its own oolong in 600 gram batches.
Published September 14, 2026. Built from a brief, no AI, no account needed to download.
The brief this store was built from
Ninth Steep is a tea shop in a former dry cleaner on Bell Street in Astoria, Oregon. Hana Petrov roasts and Dez Kwan presses, working through 600 grams of leaf at a time on a hand press Dez built out of a car jack. The oolong is roasted three times over charcoal across eleven days, which is why one cake tastes of stone fruit and the next one tastes of toast.
- Product
- Charcoal Roast Oolong Cake, 200 g, $46
- About it
- A 200 gram pressed cake of charcoal roasted oolong from the autumn picking, batch 41. It gives nine steeps in a small pot before the leaf runs out, which is where the shop got its name.
- Brand facts
- Every cake is pressed 600 grams at a time on a hand press built from a car jack, so the edges come out uneven and the weight on the label is the weight that went in. The oolong is charcoal roasted three times across eleven days, and the roast log for that batch number is printed on the back of the wrapper. Leaf is bought one harvest at a time from four growers, so a batch number sells out and the next one tastes different instead of tasting the same.
- Style
- Editorial. Editorial serif — italic headings, refined typography
Who this theme is for
A drink maker with one thing to sell and a reason behind it. Tea, coffee, cocoa, tonics, anything sold by the batch where the buyer wants to know what changed since last time. The layout puts a single tall photograph against a cream page and sets the batch facts in plain lines under it, because the shopper deciding on a 46 dollar cake is reading for the roast and the picking date, not for adjectives. It suits a shop that sells out of a batch and says so, rather than one that lists twelve blends and hopes one lands.
What was decided in the brief
The style is Editorial on the indigo variant rather than the red one. Coffee and tea photography is brown from edge to edge, so a red accent sinks into it and disappears, while an indigo button is the only cool colour on the page and the eye finds it in one pass. The heading stays a serif at a large size and the body text stays under 70 characters a line, because the roast log reads as a paragraph and a wide measure makes a reader skip it. The three fact lines sit above the product description rather than below it, since batch weight, roast count and single harvest sourcing are the claims that separate this from a tin on a supermarket shelf, and a shopper who scrolls past them has already decided on price alone.
What is in the ZIP
- A single-product homepage: hero, trust strip, benefits, how-to-use or specs, reviews, final call to action.
- The whole store shell: product, collection, cart, search and 404 templates, header, footer, announcement bar.
- Valid Shopify 2.0 sections with schema, so every line of text is editable in the Shopify editor.
- The photos you see in the preview, ready to swap for your own.
Questions
- Is this Shopify theme actually free, and do I need an account to get it?
- Yes it is free, and no account or card is needed. You download a complete Shopify 2.0 theme ZIP, then in your Shopify admin go to Online Store, then Themes, then Add theme, then Upload zip file.
- Can I swap the indigo for my own brand colour?
- Yes. The indigo is an accent set in theme settings, so open Online Store, then Customize, then Theme settings, then Colours, and change the swatch. Buttons, links and the footer all follow it without any code.
- How do I show a batch number and a roast date that change every few weeks?
- Use the three fact lines under the hero. They are plain text fields in the theme editor, so you edit them in about ten seconds when a new batch goes up, and they render as a row on desktop and a stack on a phone.
