I have no background with Florida at all (except for visiting Disney World as a child) but this is a good chance to answer the more general question. The short answer: there are great options to buy tea online, and you would get the best teas in a wider range of types at the best value there. Leaving that aside let’s consider how to find local shops.
A good starting point is Google Maps, because it’s easy. Oddly nothing turned up that looked promising to me, for better tea, but that can happen. No need to take my word for it; you can look at Maps results for “tea Gainesville FL” yourself.
Next you can check specific “tea map” resources. I only know of two, and there may be others, but those aren’t a bad place to start. They’re on tea-themed sites, Steepster and Tea Chat. The content at both sites tends to be dated, and it seems unlikely that if a new shop went in over the last 2 to 4 years (when tea interest sort of ramped up) that those references would have been updated. I’ll just reference Steepster’s link and page since they’d probably be the same (and the OP can check that other one):
Tea Rooms near gainesville florida
A lot turns up but at a glance that doesn’t look very promising to me (although closer review would confirm if my intuition is right, that those are probably ok places to pick up a bubble tea, conventional English Breakfast tea, or maybe even a tea and flowers blend, which aren’t interesting to me). To me this represents two strikes so far. There must be lots of ways to network to the information about local options, and you only need to talk to one right person for them to lay it all out for you, but I’ll only cover one more approach: search Facebook tea groups for leads.
I searched in Tea Drinker’s (one of my favorite FB tea groups, but the one I’m an admin for is International Tea Talk) and turned up just that:
Tom Wood, 10 January: Tea enthusiasts-Once again I am holding my 11th Butterfly Tea on my farm near Gainesville, Florida; February 17 from 10 AM to 4PM. My wild plum trees will be blooming and attracting butterflies. I will be serving at least 20 kinds of tea from China, India and elsewhere and displaying teapots, teaware, and tea books. There is no charge for this event…
You’ve just missed that event, by less than a month, but Tom Wood knows all about the local tea scene, for sure, and may hold another later.
If you like the idea of looking around different places for where discussions might have occurred there are other FB tea groups, or you could do a discussion section subject search on Steepster or Tea Chat (those sites I mentioned), or the Reddit tea subforum gets a lot of discussion traffic. I just looked, and the only discussion that ever came up said Volta is ok, and I suppose maybe it is:
Tea in Gainesville, FL? • r/tea
It seemed it wouldn’t be from that title, on the Maps and Steepster results, Volta Coffee, Tea and Chocolate, but selling two other things isn’t necessarily a bad sign.
Online is a different subject; I’m almost tempted to go there. I wrote a post about some of my favorite resources not so long ago, but keep in mind I live in Asia (in Thailand), so I’m talking about more direct sourcing in that, how to order from places like China. That sounds like the shipping would be way too high, but not so much. Click through to the link in that post to see either Yunnan Sourcing or Farmerleaf (who offer free worldwide shipping on orders over $30) for two options that would end up costing less than most US online vendors as long as you bought tea in that volume range, at least $30 worth of it. That post: