Why teabags don't work
Good pot-brewed tea is hard to make properly. It requires high temperatures, careful brewing and quality tea. As the temperature of the water falls from boiling, its ability to extract flavour drops exponentially: at 80º, one gets only a quarter of the flavour of tea brewed at 100º. Modern steel-mesh teapots are poor performers, affecting flavour and quickly losing heat, and few of us have time for ceramic pots and tea-cosies.
Enter the humble teabag: everyone agreed it was a timesaver, but did it make a better cup of tea? By definition, the tea in teabags isn't properly stored. Because they use mesh, the tea in teabags is exposed to the air, quickly leaching the flavour. Paper, nylon or otherwise, your tea has a shorter shelf-life, becoming stale and flavourless. In addition, the bag itself inhibits good brewing.
To demonstrate, we have brewed four cups of tea.
- In cup 1, we emptied a teabag into the Tea-Cha and brewed it.
- In cup 2, we put a teabag into the Tea-Cha.
- In cup 3, we took the teabag from cup 2 and emptied it into the Tea-Cha: much more colour is released after the paper is removed.
- In cup 4, you can see the teabag brewed for five minutes in a cup: while more colour is released, the bitterness increases with it.
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