When buying tea, you are faced with a choice: tea packed in tea bags or loose-leaf tea? Let’s start with tea bags. The little paper sachets of tea are undeniably convenient. Storage is very easy. Making a cuppa is very easy – just drop the bag into your cup, add some boiling water, give it a quick stir, take the bag out, add your milk if that is your preference, and away you go! Or if you are the outdoorsy type, they are perfect for camping or a picnic. Flat, light, and easy to pack in a poly bag – what could be better. But in terms of getting any health benefits and flavor, they are not a patch on loose-leaf tea.
We Brits are renowned for enjoying a cuppa, but the bulk of tea consumed in the UK is black tea, produced in India and presented in tea bags. This sort of tea is inevitably taken with milk added and often sugar. Fifty years ago as a lad I remember that it was a different story. Virtually every house had a tea caddy with loose-leaf tea. It was still the same old black tea, but not so crushed up and placed into bags.
Serving it was a bit of a ritual. The pot was warmed with a little boiling water. This was poured away and one teaspoon of tea added per person with “one for the pot.” Boiling water was then added and the leaves were given a quick stir before being left for 3-5 minutes to “mash.” A final stir and the tea was poured into the cup, usually with the milk already there. Allegedly, this practice arose when cups were of such poor quality that they would crack if the hot tea was poured in.
So why do teabags mash so much faster? Simple – the leaves are crushed up very finely so the water can penetrate them to extract the flavor and goodness much quicker. Good idea I hear you say. Not really, as it means that the air can also get to the interior of the leaves much more easily. This oxidizes the components of the tea, reducing the flavor and destroying the antioxidants (once they are oxidized they no longer function as such).
I first started drinking green tea because the girl behind the counter had been talking to another customer about how good the stuff was for you. So I went away, read up a bit more, and decided to give it a go. Armed with a box of clipper green tea bags, I made my first few cups. They were so disappointing. The tea had little flavor and tasted just like English Breakfast Tea, even when left for several minutes longer than recommended. So I got hold of some loose-leaf green tea. I can’t remember the brand, but it was from my local health shop. It was slightly better, but nothing much to write home about.
So that was that, at least for a few years until I came across some green tea from a company called Adagio. What a huge difference! Their loose-leaf green tea had an incredible flavor, very different from the everyday black tea bag tea and certainly much better than the green tea bag tea. Gourmet-quality tea was the way forward for me. After trying out several brands, I eventually settled on In Nature teas. For me, the flavor is the nicest and I really like their other teas, particularly their oolong teas, which have a sweet and faintly nutty flavor.
Although I am no tea connoisseur or tea snob (I still like the traditional British cuppa made with a tea bag and find it refreshing), for anything other than the everyday cup of tea, I prefer loose-leaf tea. Based on my experience of the health food shop loose-leaf green tea, I spend a bit more and go for gourmet quality, as I believe it is worth it.
How about you?
This post first published on the blog 18 June 2013.
Thanks for sharing your tea journey Kev. It’s really fascinating to hear what lead people down this healthy road. You’ve probably noticed that we have some advertisers on our home page. We would not accept advertising from any vendor that we didn’t vet. Each provides excellent quality teas so there’s never any risk when ordering through them. T Ching does not have any vested financial interest in any tea companies so we’re free to offer our genuine recommendations. Excellent quality is a must and compassionate, responsible tea growing/sources is what we demand. I find, where ever I travel in the U.S., that the vast majority of tea houses offer excellent teas. Join us in supporting your local tea shops and when ever you’re visiting a new area, check out their tea shops. I hope small, independently owned tea shops will continue to thrive.
It is interesting how tea rituals begin and it sounds like the Brits had imported the lower grades of tea, as did Tetley and early suppliers of tea to the U.S. How un- fortunate that they decided to buy the fannings – those small fragments of tea that are like dust on the floor. Had they not been so greedy and short sighted, they could have sourced good quality tea which would have brought the tea industry further along sooner and had a positive impact on the health of vast numbers of people. As you pointed out, with the taste being so poor, people learned to add milk and sugar which made it drinkable. Today, the options are vast. Have you tried a good quality Breakfast tea? It can easily stand by itself without anything added. I hope the Brits are moving in the same direction as us Americans. We’re enjoying the taste of high quality teas and appreciating tea as a health beverage. Now that’s a win/win scenario.
Great article Kev! I loved the simple honest opinion. I’ve just opened an online store specializing in gourmet loose teas come check it out if you have chance! :)
Everyone has their own path to discovering loose leaf. =) I know it’s better, and it tastes better, but I still use high quality bagged tea most of the time. It’s about the tradition; it’s what I’ve always done, what my family did before me. To make it too fancy would be to getting to good for my roots, and I wouldn’t want that… ;-] But the health benefits you point out with respect to antioxidants are interesting and something to think about! Hadn’t thought of that!
Thanks for the article. With your description of someone making a pot the traditional British way, I felt like I was there.
The bottom line with who has the best tea is that the companies who can afford to advertise are the ones who get the customers and attention. When we started our retail store, we had already put in over 2 years of ‘search’ time and sampled enough tea to float a cruise liner. We found that some of the smallest importers (with some background in the country/language of country of origin) had the very best teas. We rated on a scale of 1 to 10 and only 9’s and 10’s made it in our store..and online.
You’d expect paper to disintegrate in water, but I always wondered why paper teabags do not. I recently found the answer in a number of websites and frankly it troubled me quite a bit. Here’s one example: http://everythingfortea.com/iii5
Loose leaf tea is much better than tea bags. If you will extract the flavor from the fresh tea leaves then the taste would give an extra amount of energy to your body. A pinch of extra flavor from the tea leaves gives immense amount of energy in your body.