Loose Leaf Tea Vs Tea Bags
Tea Bags is easy to brew, they have a consistent taste and is cheap and easy to mass produce. But, let me tell you that it is high time that you ditch the tea bags and go for whole leaves tea rather!!
- The leaves in most tea bags are actually the ‘dust and fannings’ from broken tea leaves.
- Finely broken tea leaves (which is what’s needed to fit them into a tiny bag) have lost most of their essential oils and aroma.
- When steeped, these fine tea leaves release more tannins than loose leaf tea or whole leaf tea, resulting in more bitter or astringent brews. If you’re simply adding sugar and milk into your tea until it tastes palatable, go for it. But if you want to enjoy the complex flavours in your tea and be able to drink it the way you like, brewing loose leaf will give you more flexibility in terms of how much tea to use to adjust for the desired flavour and astringency.
- Tea leaves need room to expand for full flavour. You will have a first hand experience of the dunking, swirling, squeezing process of brewing tea bags.This can also be really pretty, especially with loose leaf tea blends that contains whole, real ingredients.
- Tea bag tea is typically produced industrially in huge batches, and they typically sit on the shelf for months or maybe years before they make it to your tea pot. Show yourself and your tea pot some love and brew some fresh loose leaf tea.
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Canadian researchers found that some plastic tea bags shed high levels of microplastics into water.These tea bags actually flood every cup with multitudes of microplastics – according to a new study released by researchers at McGill University in Montreal last week. The team found that steeping a plastic tea bag at a brewing temperature of 95°C releases around 11.6 billion microplastics – tiny pieces of plastic between 100 nanometres and 5 millimetres in size – into a single cup. That is several orders of magnitude higher than other foods and drinks.
Read more: Source 1, Source 2
To Conclude, let me make it more clear to you so that you can decide on your own what is the best pick for you:
ARTISAN LOOSE LEAF TEA
Produced in the artisan orthodox method
- Whole leaf, high-quality grade tea
- Subtle nuances and flavor extracted from whole tea leaves that are allowed to expand fully in hot water
- Packaged loose in airtight containers to seal in freshness and flavor
- Produced seasonally in small quantities in an artisan method that involves hand-picking and hand-sorting quality tea leaves
- The same leaves can be steeped multiple times for several cups of tea
COMMERCIAL TEA BAG
Produced in the machine-driven non-orthodox or Crush-Tear-Curl (CTC) method- Cut leaf, low-grade tea dust and fannings
- One-dimensional flavor profile meant for a strong brew that can stand up to milk and sugar
- Often bagged in bleached paper material that can add chemicals and off flavors to your brewed cup
- Machine-produced in high volume to be warehoused and stored for long periods of time
- Flavor is fully extracted after just one steeping.
Thus, we can conclude that Loose Leaf Tea is generally superior to the tea bags.
1 thought on “Loose Leaf Tea Vs Tea Bags”
Abhilasha
Absolutely Agree. Loose leaf teas are the best.