What's the Difference Between Loose Leaf Tea vs Tea Bags?
A modern dilemma. You’re busy. You don’t have time to perform a Japanese tea ceremony, carefully preparing each component, then drinking the result in a leisurely way. (A full ceremony, including food and drink can take five hours.) But you do enjoy a truly fine cup. What to do?
The dilemma may never be fully resolved, but the choice starts with exploring loose leaf versus tea in tea bags. Thomas Sullivan is reputed to have first introduced tea bags in the mid-19th century. He made samples of different teas carefully enclosed in a cloth bag for his customers, to help them select a tea. He intended them to open the bag and prepare the tea from its contents.
He soon discovered they were using the samples unopened in order to make their brew. The fine cloth mesh kept the tea leaf bits from making their way into the cup. That created the possibility of drinking it down to the last drop without having to ingest the leaves. The method was a hit.
More than a century has passed and bags and their contents have gone through much evolution, sometimes not for the better. Bags today are finer, stronger, and lighter weight. They’re manufactured and inspected to the highest health standards. But the contents are not always the best that can be had in the world of tea.
In the 1970s, ‘natural’ became the watchword of all food and beverage products, especially those made from plants. Tea certainly qualifies. As a result, loose leaf tea was looked on as a superior alternative. And, in many cases it is. There are hundreds of truly fine loose leaf teas imported from many parts of the globe.
Loose leaf teas from China, India, Japan, and elsewhere can be as pleasing to the connoisseur as a fine wine. The gentle jasmine from China stacks up well against a sweet orange tea from Turkey. Or, one may enjoy an outstanding mint tea from Africa.
By contrast, many bag teas are made essentially from left-overs, called fannings. Scraps of tea leaf that remain from processing are fed into a machine that fills thousands of bags per hour. The result is lined up into a box that contains a hundred or more which is shipped off to a grocery store. There it sits until someone takes it home. By the time it is actually consumed, a tea that was never very high quality to begin with may be stale.
But simply being in a bag isn’t an inevitable sign of low quality. Many vendors have evolved from the granola days to combine the high quality of a loose leaf tea with the convenience and other benefits of a bag. Though they often go by the more elegant name of “sachet,” it’s still tea in a bag. But the difference is that the tea is of the utmost quality and is sold fresh. That difference is important.
So, retain your busy lifestyle when you must. But take a few minutes on occasion to celebrate your efforts. Treat yourself to a truly fine cup of tea, and enjoy it without a dozen distractions. You’ve earned it.
The 5 Minute Guide To Tea History
Tea, as a beverage, is older than coffee, older than wine and maybe even older than beer. Some may argue about the latter, since some types of beer may be as old as 10,000 years, while tea has been around for ‘only’ about 5,000. Fair enough, let’s not quibble. Tea is old.
Tea is also enormously popular. That much is obvious at a casual glance. But just how popular is it? Annual production today of tea leaves is in the neighborhood of 2 billion pounds. Yes, billion. Considering it only takes an ounce or so to make a cup, that’s a lot of tea. And that is the annual production. Annual, as in: ‘every year’.
Well, you say, at least tea has less caffeine than coffee. Yes and no. Tea leaves have about 1-3% caffeine by weight, more than twice as much as a similar weight of coffee beans. But, it’s true that a prepared cup of coffee will have about 100mg of caffeine and tea only about 60mg. And, after all, people drink tea and coffee much more often than they eat the leaves or beans.
Beer, wine, coffee and tea all have health benefits some of which are the result of the very same compounds present in the drink. Antioxidants are present in both wine and tea. Caffeine, in moderate amounts, has been shown to have healthy effects.
But, let’s face it. For most people it isn’t history or economics or science or medicine that creates the huge, centuries-old and present-day demand for tea. Tea is simply wonderful to drink.
Whether you want a robust pick me up in the morning, or a relaxing hot cup at night, tea is - dare we say it - perfect. It clears out the cobwebs and at the same time relaxes. Iced or hot, green or black (or Oolong, which is in between), or even red or white (yes, they exist), tea tastes great and makes you feel wonderful.
Throughout history and up to the present day, drinking tea has been both a delightful experience and a social ceremony. Yes, people will certainly sit down and enjoy a cup of coffee or a mug of beer or glass of wine together.
But in very few cultures is there anything like a ‘beer ceremony’. Ok, in a way there are, among college students. But, calling those ‘ceremonies’ is really stretching a point. Anyway, tea ceremonies aren’t exclusive to Japan. In England it’s practically an afternoon requirement. New York has clubs devoted to the fine art of tea.
East and west sometimes agree on very little. But all over the world - China, Turkey, Russia, Australia, the U.S. and the UK, and all the points on the map in between enjoy a cup of tea.
So wherever you are, you can now have a Wu Yi in a Yixing clay pot, or a Rooibos in a Danish glass cup. You can enjoy a lemon grass tisane or even a blueberry vanilla Ceylon. What you can’t do, if you are among the over one billion tea drinkers in the world, is resist a perfectly brewed cup of the world’s finest drink. Tea.
How to Best Store Loose Tea Leaves
You’ve gone to great lengths to find a great tea. You’ve spent two to five times or more what it would cost to get an ordinary tea from the grocery store. But even fine teas can go stale, like any agricultural product. In fact, finer teas often have fewer or no artificial preservatives and can decay the quickest. But keeping your tea stored properly can make it last as long as a year.
A proper tin or chest is your best defense against the aging effects of air and light. You can find them in different materials and hundreds of stylish designs. But the two chief characteristics they need to have are to be airtight and light-proof.
Ordinary sunlight and indoor lighting both have a UV component. That energetic light wave can break down the molecules in tea, stripping color and flavor over time. Keeping your teas in the dark may not allow you to enjoy a display of the multi-colored fine leaves from around the world. But it is preferred in order to preserve the flavor and appearance of the brew.
Air contains oxygen, which readily combines with a wide variety of organic molecules, altering them. The result is rarely an enhancement of the flavor of tea. That oxidation breaks apart molecules and changes their flavor profile.
But air has more than just oxygen. It also carries odors from foods, air pollutants like hydrogen sulfide (a component of smog) and other compounds. Those readily find their way into both the water and the tea leaf and bag. Keeping air out during storage keeps those chemical reactions to the minimum. Those will happen on a very small scale when the tin or chest is opened, but not enough to cause a change that most can detect.
Air also contains moisture, water molecules that float around. Higher humidity climates have more, desert climates have relatively less, but all but the most extreme environments have some. Moist air carries odors, enhances the effect of oxidation and can itself produce chemical changes. It can also form an environment that is friendly to the growth of mold and other organisms that can ruin your tea.
Keeping the interior of the tin or chest moisture tight and dry helps your tea retain the optimum flavor. Get an airtight tin or chest, then add a small desiccant to absorb water that gets within the container.
Since tea leaves themselves will evaporate a certain amount over time, it’s best to keep each one separated. The flavor profile of your favorite oolong can be altered if it’s exposed to the same air as a good rooiboos. Whether you use individual tins, or a type of container in which each cubical is closed off is a matter of convenience.
A good tea caddy is your first and best line of defense. But help it along by keeping teas away from spices, heat and other things in the kitchen that can rob your tea of flavor. Storing the tea in a cool, dry area away from pungent foods - and away from other teas - will reduce the chances of your fine leaf being exposed or degraded.