THE BIRTH OF TEA BAGS

While I was brewing my Pu’er tea this morning, I came to realize that that one can’t get this much good taste by brewing using tea bags (this is my personal opinion, others opinion might be different). This might be one of the reasons that you may never find Chinese tea in tea bags although this is a separate and lengthy topic why we can’t find Chinese tea in bags which I will share with you some other day or you might visit us to MindGym and get to talk with us on lot of such interesting knowledge along with drinking best Chinese tea and experiencing Chinese culture but for now I will share an interesting story of how the birth of tea bags occurred .

The purpose of the tea bag is rooted in the belief that for tea to taste its best, the leaves ought to remove from the hot water at the end of a specific brewing period. Then there is the added benefit of convenience - a removable device means that tea can be made as easily in a mug as in a pot, without the need for a tea strainer, and that tea pots can be kept clean more easily. But the earliest examples of removable infusing devices for holding tea were not bags. Popular infusers included tea eggs and tea balls - perforated metal containers which were filled with loose leaves and immersed in boiling water, and then removed using an attached chain.

The popular custom of buying tea in tea bags came about quite by accident in 1908, according to Liversidge. She attributes the accident to the method a New York tea dealer named Thomas Sullivan used to send tea samples around the world. Sullivan’s wife made silk bags to ship the samples, with the idea that people would remove the leaves from the bags to brew the tea, according to Liversidge. But, Liversidge writes in “Homegrown Tea,” when the samples arrived, people thought they were supposed to brew the tea in the bags. rather than emptying out the contents. It was thus by accident that the tea bag was born! Responding to the comments from his customers that the mesh on the silk was too fine, Sullivan developed sachets made of gauze - the first purpose-made tea bags.

During the 1920s these were developed for commercial production, and the bags grew in popularity in the USA. Made first of all from gauze and later from paper, they came in two sizes, a larger bag for the pot, a smaller one for the cup. The features that we still recognise today were already in place - a string that hung over the side, so the bag could be removed easily, with a decorated tag on the end.

So, this was story of birth of birth of tea bag, I hope you like it. Stay tuned with MindGym I will soon be back with some other interesting story or knowledge about tea. Meanwhile keep drinking tea with friends or family and keep spreading love and peace. that’s the only moto of MindGym to make the world a better place than it was yesterday using Chinese tea a culture.