New use for Lipton teabags

I've never disassembled a tea bag. I cut them open once in a while and use the loose leaf. I used the same clay pot and infuser for decades without cleaning. For emergencies I used coffee filter and styrofoam cup. Most loose tea you can drink off the top. The fines will settle and the leaf you sip with lips.

Jim

PS I did my taxes yesterday. I th> I took my brew basket home from work last week for cleaning, and forgot

I normally don't need to wash my infuser either, but after an unfortunate incident where I left some tea in it over a weekend ago at work I came back to a science experiment. I was just going to wash it until I could get out to the mall to buy another, but I keep forgetting it at home now that it is cleaned. I never wash my Yixing ware, this is just a nylon brew basket. I had been drinking past the loose tea (like with the dragon tears) but I was down to the last of my Margaret's Hope and it is not all nice and large.

I fully agree with the Boston Tea Party comment. I had read a paper the other day that was pretty brilliant (which means it will go nowhere and make no impact on government) but it was a proposal to tie state government pay raises to increases in the minimum wage. Now that is a hell of an idea, but that will happen when pigs are flying level with their private jets.

PS I actually have a tea brick from a colonial fair that is identical to the ones from the Boston Tea Party. You are suppose to shave off some of it into boiling water for tea, which I tried and it produced a cup full of hot water with some wood-like shavings floating in it. I can't figure out how that tea was usable at all, and yes this was a new tea brick meant to be consumed. ;)

[Dominic T.]

Also, just another "discovery" the Lipton teabag is actually a long tube, folded on center and the corners folded in at the top. I had always thought it to just be a small pouch with the top corners folded in and stapled. I guess I never really studied a standard teabag until my endeavor today, the unbleached "pouch-like" empty teabags were the only ones I had owned and used.

[Kevin] I used to make teabag rockets when I was a kid ^^. Just google "teabag

• rocket", you'll see...

Heh, learned something new. I will have to try that. My fiance is an elementary school teacher and this could be a neat experiment... although well controlled since fire is involved. I'm guessing the use of the term "rocket" is used loosely here, as it I would imagine it being a gentle upward rise.

Neat. +1 Mr. Wizard point for you Kevin. :)

- Dominic

There are four grades of tea leaves:

1. whole leaf
2. broken
3. fannings
4. dust

Dust is precisely what the big teabag packers use. Because the people who buy that stuff don't know any better. And, actually, because it's the only thing you can really do with dust, and the only thing that really works in those tiny bags. Bigger pieces expand and clog the bag rather quickly. When I use a T-sac, I put a coffee stirrer in the top to keep it open so the leaves don't crowd against the seal that forms when the top gets wet.

Fannings are the sort of thing you'll find in a tin of Twinings.

Broken-leaf tea is more like what a lot of the tea merchants sell if they don't specify whole-leaf.

Whole-leaf, of course, is a premium tea. I'm not sure it's much different from broken-leaf, but it does indicate more care in handling, and as it brings a better price it seems to be aligned with the better teas, which the pickers will treat better in the first place. But I wouldn't call it a perfect indicator of quality by any means.

--Blair

Blair P. snipped-for-privacy@v46g2000cwv.googlegroups.com4/17/06

22: snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com

To what Blair has said I'd like to add that "whole leaf" does not necessarily mean premium, since there are lots and lots of lousy whole leaf teas out there. Don't think because your leaf is whole, it's good. There is a world of whole leaf tea, running the gamut from extraordinary to awful. Some of this is a matter of taste, of course; some is a matter of staleness, tiny vis-a-vis large (older) leaf, not to mention quality of the tea tree whence it came.

Michael

I have always been fully aware of the grading and the classification of "dust," but I never thought it was such a literal meaning. The contents were 99% baby-powder fine brown dust, with a few microscopic flecks of tea leaf. Even the lowest grade $0.99 a box teabags from the asian market contain at least "fanning" grade tea, it has to actually take more effort to produce such a fine powder than the fannings.

- Dominic Drinking: Dragon Tears

I've never really examined the contents of my teabags before, but this discussion interested me enough to sacrifice a couple. The Uncle Lee's jasmine from the asian market ($2.99 per 100) is definitely fannings from the description given. Tiny, but recognizable as Chinese green tea. The Swee Touch Nee ($4.00 for two boxes of 100 at the local supermarket) is a little more powdery, but still not as much so as the Lipton previously described.

I actually have better taste than this, but I can't really afford to cultivate it to the extent that really good tea becomes a must-have item. Actually, the Uncle Lee's is better than a lot of "premium" bagged teas I've gotten at (for example) Whole Foods or similar places.

Dom> > Dom> > > I was really surprised at the quality (lack thereof)

I once saw a wholesale price list for dust. It was a dollar or two per kilo. Can you imagine how many teabags you could get from a kilo of dust?

Michael

What if one takes a blend of tea that would otherwise be BOP or something of more reasonable quality, normally sold as loose tea, and ground it up into "dust" to allow it's use in tea bags? Could Lipton etc. be doing that?

Just because the contents of the tea bag looks like dust, it may not be the lowest quality tea conventionally classified as "dust". It may be slightly better tea that has been ground to a finer size for use in tea bags (with all the limitations of tea bags).

In other words, criticize Lipton tea bags because they taste horrible, not because their contents looks like "dust tea".

Hey Aloke, I actually wasn't criticising as much as intrigued. I drink Lipton every once in a while with lots of sugar or honey and enjoy it for what it is. I have seen what I would consider to be tea dust before, and all I was saying is that I now have a whole new outlook on what constitutes "dust" and it is really dust.

Also, what I am saying is that it would have to cost more to turn tea into such a complete powder than just minute bits like in the asian teabags I have.

And above all I was more happy that when in a pinch I can have a really nice long tea sac from a Lipton teabag that has been emptied with more than enough room for good tea to exapnd due to the construction of the teabags.

- Dominic Drinking: nuttin' yet :(

Asian teabags in general are more BOP varietal versus Western fanning blends. I can always taste a teabag in a cup even unbleached. So if that is all I had I would cut open and use in a pot. A pot brings out the best taste that any loose tea has to offer. I prefer dust of something I like than grade of something I don't. I think the main error of using teabags is overbrewing. I lay the bag on the surface and then dunk three times when almost waterlogged. Don't squeeze bag.

Jim

PS If I had it to do over aga> Aloke Prasad wrote:

Where in the hell do the "PS"es come from in your recent posts? :) Are these random automated attachments or am I missing something?

- me

It started with a remodel question about granite counter tops and tea stains and covers other tea minutia related to remodeling such as what to do with spare lazy suzans. The crew who has been doing the remodel thought my tongs were stashes of pot when they were working on the plumbing in the basement. The foreman has a weight problem so I gave him a 2003 Xiaguan cooked beeng. It's my remodel PS equivalent of what others say about the tea they drink or the the kind of music they listen too at the end of their posts.

Jim

Dom> > Asian teabags in general are more BOP varietal versus Western fanning

Gotcha. I used to work in a cubicle farm for a bank's IT dept. and had my electric kettle, tea mug, etc. on my desk in a corner. One night (around sept. 11th) security guards were doing a walkthough after hours and saw the 4 or 5 baggies filled with "leaves" on my desk and confiscated them and turned me in. I came in the next morning to a massive inquiry and a ton of really pissed off people. I explained it was tea (none of them even knew such a thing as loose tea existed) and then I took them back to my desk to show the kettle and mug. Not wanting to admit they could have been wrong, they made me get rid of the kettle and the mug (??) and still took my tea and acted like I was still guilty. I left there in December so I just lived with regular teabags until then.

I think even the dumbest of potheads would be smart enough to not place

5 baggies of their finest stash on their desk in plain sight.

Who knows, good luck with the remodel.

- Dominic PS When you open a bag of cotton balls, is the top one meant to be thrown away?

Unbelievable. It's occurred to me that such a mistake coould be made... I often buy small amounts of herbs or teas from the bulk section of my local co-op, and I suppose someone could take the little baggies of leafy substances to be pot, *if* they were really, really ignorant. But I'd never heard about it actually happening.

It's a toss-up for me (Lipton tea bag vs. average coffee at a friend's house). Say like on an airplane when the tea bag and tepid water used to brew tea (or worse, instant tea brewed back in the galley) guarantees a horrible cup, I take coffee. At least, because of public demand, the coffee will be acceptable.

My point was simply this: Lipton may have mechanically crushed BOP for use in their tea bag. The dust may not be the true dust that we think of... at the bottom of the tea processing foodchain.

After experiencing the variations in the single estate teas, I have a healthy respect for Lipton and their tea tasters/blenders in their producing remarkably similar products in every lot. I wouldn't put it past them to create a blend from BOP and crushing it to suit the use in a bag. Although their tea does have more "color" than "flavor" compared to Asian tea bags (although I haven't tried very many of those).