Are tea bags bad?

[gurdymonkey]

YouTube's algorithms have caught onto me. Yesterday I watched a specialist in high-end Chinese teas do a comparison taste-test of a loose leaf vs. tea bag tea. Unsurprisingly, he gave the tea bag a thumbs down. Of course, this presenter has a vested interest in getting viewers interested in the fine teas he sells, but are mass market teas really the devil?

The tea bag is a 20th century invention. Evidently a couple of different people came up with similar ideas roughly around the same time period, but it's safe to say that patents and the appearance of small individual bags of tea started before WWI in the US, and had pretty much caught hold as *the* way to brew and drink tea by the 1920s, which is right around the time my grandparents were getting married and starting to have families. 

Grandma McGee drank bagged teas, so Mom did, and I seem to recall that I started my tea drinking with brands like Red Rose, Lipton, sometimes interspersed with grocery store generics, because Mom was a Depression baby and you bought what was cheapest. 

At that point, tea was just tea. I didn't know anything about it, it was just something hot and wet and reddish-brown that we drank. Sometimes we'd stick a couple of bags into an old cider jug and threw in the fridge to steep for iced tea. (The less said about powdered iced tea mixes the better!) I generally drank my tea with one sugar, no milk, and eventually ditched the sugar. Drinking tea at Grandma's kitchen table made me feel pretty grown up. She always had mugs with pretty pictures of birds on them. 

Tea bags are convenient. You can drop one in your mug, add water, and not have to faff around with a strainer or making an entire pot of the stuff when it's just you. And up until 1996, the Food and Drug Administration had official tea tasters checking the quality of imported teas, so what you got in your little paper bag was fairly consistent. Consistency is the linchpin of mass marketing. It's why you can go into any MacDonalds and your burger and fries will be exactly what you expect. Thus too with the fairly generic tea I grew up with. 

So what was in it? It was brown and black crumbs, bitter on the tongue if your bag happened to break and you got a piece of it in your tea. If the label on the box called it anything, it was probably "pekoe," which, according to Wikipedia, I have been pronouncing wrong all my life. It's PECK-oh, not PEEK-oh, some sort of vaguely English style black tea or tea blend, probably from India or Sri Lanka. And the stuff that was in our tea bags is the fannings, the scraps and crumbs left over after the better quality tea leaves have been selected to be sold at a higher price. (Grading is its own science. I don't purport to know about it.)

And yet, those crumbs are part of the convenience. Not only does the tea seller have a market for the cheap stuff as the public demand for tea grows, those broken leaf bits steep FAST. In mere seconds, you can rush out of the break room with a hot mug and get back to work.  

Of course, nowadays, there has been an explosion of flavors and varieties of teas and herbal infusions available to the general public. The average supermarket chain can supply you with anything from old-school Lipton to lines like Twinings, Bigelow and Tazo, all in convenient bags. You can have your "Earl Grey, Hot" or a spicy chai or something comforting and herbal with optimum convenience and several ounces of hot water. And some purveyors of higher quality teas recognize that some people LIKE tea bags and offer them as an option. Vahdam India does, as does Ippodo Kyoto.

This is not a bad thing, and if you are perfectly happy with your daily cuppa, that's great. Bigelow is what we stocked in my company break room (pre-pandemic) and I had no problem with their Earl Grey or English Breakfast in my thermal mug. I have a half box of Choice Organic Teas Darjeeling in the house which is surprisingly good. Yorkshire Gold - which I admit I decided to try simply because of the awesome Sean Bean commercial - makes a delicious cold brewed iced tea. 

Tea bags allow more people to enjoy drinking tea. They can also lead you into discovering other varieties, flavors and ways to enjoy your tea . Whether your journey is having an "old friend" by your side through thick and thin, or tasting and discovering new ones, it's up to you. 

Comments

[mermaidlady]

I try not to be a snob about tea, but I do (well, did pre-pandemic) carry my preferred tea bags in a darling tea wallet, just in case the selection in a restaurant was not to my liking (I can't stand Earl Grey).

I was in a diner once and when I ordered hot tea, the waitress asked "Barry's or Lipton?" I chose Barry's, as any right-thinking person given that choice would, and then asked "Does anyone actually pick Lipton?' She said "Once."

[gurdymonkey]

The cafe we go/went to before rapier practice had Numi teas, which are pretty decent.

[danabren]

You used "faff" in a sentence, which made me smile.

That ad was AMAZING.

And yes, we don't discuss powdered mix. My last experience with that had something to do with a bottle of vodka, which worked about as well as you might think.

[gurdymonkey]

I may watch way too much UK tv. ;)

And I'm cracking up because I remember my sister mixing vodka and Wyler's lemonade mix in beer mugs and serving that vile shit at a house party back in the 80s. Nasty.

[danabren]

brrrrr