Wednesday, July 09, 2008
Posted by 醉茶生 at 10:15 PM | Comments (1) | Permalink
Categories: Tea Tea Related

Tea ought not to be infused too long in hot water, and ought therefore to be removed after the appropriate amount of time has passed. For this reason, convenient infusers such as tea balls (a spherical stainless steel mesh for containing tea) and other metal infusers were popular in the 19th century and early 20th century.

In 1904, Thomas Sullivan, a New York tea merchant, began sending his customers samples of tea in small hand-sewn silk bags, some of whom mistakenly assumed that the entire bag ought to be immersed in hot water instead of first removing the leaves to be used in the usual manner. Following complaints that the weave of the silk was too fine, Mr Sullivan began issuing (cheaper) bags made of gauze instead. Thus was born the tea bag.

While tea bags were popular in the US before the war, the British were far less enthusiastic, and tea bags were only introduced to Britain in 1953 by Tetley’s (the Yorkshire tea merchants).  The convenience of the tea bag is its main selling point, and today, more than 95% of all tea sold in Britain is sold in bags.

There is nothing intrinsically wrong with tea bags per se. The main complaints are that bags which are too small do not allow the leaves inside to expand (an easily rectified problem), or that paper alters the taste of the tea (Teapigs use plastic mesh instead). However, the cardinal sin of tea bags is really that they permit manufacturers to sell to Joe Public enormous quantities of vile cheap tea powder (or “warehouse sweepings”, also known as cut-tear-curl tea), where the leaf fragments are too small to use in a tea pot and would otherwise be unusable and unsalable.

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