Loose tea is often cheaper and of better quality in my experience. If you brew tea a lot using a reusable strainer seems like a much better choice. I'm also entirely convinced that these plastic pyramid-shaped bags are pure marketing. Then again, I find Lipton tea absolutely terrible regardless of the shape of the bag.
My buddy used to work for Lipton. He explained that they use the cheapest grade of tea (dust) available. Also many tea companies mix non-tea additives (fillers) to their tea bags.
After hearing this I decided, if it's not full loose leaf, I don't drink it. We found that companies like Elephant Chateau (http://elephantchateau.com) deliver the 3 highest grades of tea direct from Ceylon mountain estates with the option for plant-based pyramid bags (soilon) or a free stainless steel infuser.
Bonus, the tea actually tastes like tea and is tasty enough to drink plain unlike Lipton dust. It always funny to hear people promote all the health benefits of tea then turn around and dump 100 grams of sugar into a cup to make it palatable.
I remember a local guide in Uzbekistan (I was on vacation there years ago) "The good tea, we keep it. The average one, we sell it. The bad one we send it to Europe to make tea bags."
Luckily I had been using leaves to make my tea at home. Probably the average quality one.
Tea bag tea is much finer dust compared to loose leaf of the same brand. So it brews faster (and worse). They change the blend to try and compensate.
Tried Liptons once. On our very first trip to the USA, we needed a decent cup of tea. Visited Walmart, bought really expensive pack of Liptons which I think was one of just a very few teas among millions of coffees. Made tea, instantly regretted it. Surprising considering it's from Unilever who make the UK's best seller: PG, which is OK but a bit weak.
The place we stayed that leg got most of a pack of free tea bags, and we found somewhere that could make tea - without ice or lemon. :)
Thankfully plastic tea bags don't seem to have become popular here. Asda (Walmart) did them for a while, so we switched brands.
Putting aside the quality of the tea, a reusable strainer is always going to be a more environmentally friendly choice than one-time-use bags, and it may be a healthier choice as well (depending on how sanitary you keep the strainer).
But if you have to go with a one-time-use container, a paper bag seems like an improvement on both counts versus a plastic one. The article indicates that the only reason some brands go with the plastic bags is to appear more "premium," which if true is a great testament for how people are willing to strangle both themselves and the planet in order to accrue a couple extra status points.
From an ecological standpoint it makes much more sense too. When you buy a box of lipton tea bags you basically get 20x2g of tea in 20x2 grams of trash packaged in a box inside a plastic film.
> Loose tea is often cheaper and of better quality in my experience.
This is indeed my experience as well. Still, the convenience factor of Lipton tea cannot be understated.
I'm personally willing to bring in my own tea, metal strainers + teaspoon measurement to my workplace for example (hot-water is usually available in most offices). But that's probably too much for a lot of people.
In contrast, you can usually get Lipton Tea from the office supplies, use some paper cups (also office supplies), and get to tea drinking without having to buy the supplies.
> Then again, I find Lipton tea absolutely terrible regardless of the shape of the bag.
I was gonna say, they literally taste worse than the cheaper paper-based tea bags. I mean loose leaf is nice, but those plastic pyramid things are just shit.
Ugh, yet another "hmm, never thought of that" thing to worry about, but it comes at a good time. I was just giving thought to going to back to loose leaf and a tea ball as I was preparing some Trader Joe's Earl Grey that comes in an individual plastic wrapper, along with a string and a bag, and whatever else. For a cup of tea. I'm one step away from a Kuerig. Other brands in the cupboard aren't a whole lot better on packaging.
And now plastic in my tea. The wife's got to have a tea strainer in here somewhere...
I've been trying to avoid groceries that come with single-use plastic and it's tough. Grapes and cherry tomatoes come in plastic bags or cartons, even at salt-of-the-earth type places. Meat or cheese from the deli gets a zip lock. There's no way to use the olive bar without grabbing a plastic carton, in various sizes.
I wouldn't have even suspected the tea bags themselves. I assume some of them are still made with natural fibers but how would you know?
Some of these fancy bags (e.g. from tea pigs) are made from polylactic acid. This is derived from corn starch and used in temporary medical implants (it degrades to lactic acid) so hopefully it's safe.
I drink a decent amount of tea, and I feel like this is largely confined to the mid-grade teas that are fancier than your basic Lipton or Twinings, but not-so-fancy as to be loose-leaf.
I also see grocery-store versions at Target and such. Those appear to be the ones that employee the plastic triangle satchet. The cheaper stuff, from what I can tell, is still using paper.
The use of "some" and "may" in titles always bothers me. Seems like there should be more concrete language available to state the point the article is attempting to make.
This is bad, but most "paper" tea bags still include plastic in their manufacture as part of the heat sealing. English article about which brands do and don't here, note that it's all the mass market brands that include plastic, so that's most of the market.
I drink tea over coffee (for digestive reasons), and I assume I am missing out on really good tea. Any readily-available loose-leaf tea recommendations?
I mail ordered from TeeGschwendner (https://www.teegschwendner.de/en) for years, and their quality is very solid. I stopped because our local yarn store (!) had a truly excellent looseleaf tea selection.
Sadly, going to an upscale tea place in an urban area does not guarantee you decent tea, nor are places consistent. There are places that have nice blacks and greens, but utterly miserable rooibos (this is quite common).
Depending on what you mean by "really good tea". There are both varieties of tea, and then grades of quality within the same variety.
For Chinese teas easily found in the US, dragon well (longjing) and iron buddha (tie guan yin) are very drinkable green teas. Iron Buddha tends to taste a bit more metallic, leafy, and sweet, Dragon Well tends to have a warmer flavor with a tiny hint of savoriness. Both are much lighter in flavor than, say, Earl Grey, which makes them very drinkable even in large quantities, but if you're used to Earl Grey you might not be able to taste these teas. If you want a stronger, more earthy, less leafy flavor, you can find puerh fairly easily. There's a very large range of quality for puerh, so this can be a rabbit hole. As a general rule, you should only buy loose leaf for Chinese tea varieties. I've had dragon well in a bag/sachet before and it tastes like a poor facsimile.
I specifically didn't mention Jasmine because Jasmine tea is often a lower grade of quality in the US, which has the downside of tasting too leafy/bitter/heavy on tannin. If you find a higher quality loose leaf Jasmine, it's also a very drinkable tea that you might like.
In general, I personally prefer leaf-only-no-added-flavors teas, but everyone's tastes differ. What I recommend to everyone who asks is to try a lot of varieties from different countries (mainly China, Japan, India, and try white, green, red, and black varieties), try a few of the flowery/herbal/fruity blends, and settle on whatever you like.
I found a green-ish oolong tea I liked, it's one of these: http://teapedia.org/en/Formosa_oolong_tea (Formosa Jade mountain or Formosa dongding). I don't know about availability, you'll need to find a tea shop and I'm sure they have something similar.
The aroma of it is something completely different than cheaper green teas.
I drink a lot of tea and my dealer of choice is uptontea.com (by coincidence I ordered $80 of tea today). Pretty much everything they have is high quality. I prefer Darjeeling black teas; try one of the cheaper blends to see if you like it. Get a good $5 strainer and you'll be good to go.
Pu'er isn't that uncommon and has a rather unique, earthy almost smoky flavor do to aging and fermentation. Personally I like it aged about 10 years as 5 is too weak and 15-20 too strong.
> the tea bags released microplastic and even smaller nanoplastic particles — and not just the hundreds or thousands Tufenkji had been expecting.
this is a misleading title. if one microplastic is a thousand nanoplastics then obviously it's going to be trillions of nanoplastics and billions of microplastics.
> "We were shocked when we saw billions of particles in a single cup of tea," she said.
So if you get this "bubble tea" with tapioca balls in it, are they macro particles?
No, because it depends on how it's breaking down. If you have one cohesive sheet of plastic, it would be wrong to say that you have trillions of nanoparticles of plastic.
The concerns with plastics that break up into many smaller pieces and enter the body and wider ecosystem are different (and potentially worse) than the concerns of the impacts of a single macro piece.
This is the big question. I think people around the world have been ingesting microplastic for 30 years or longer, yet there's no reported case of any direct toxic effects. So I guess microplastic doesn't have immediately effects on health, but I won't be surprised if future studies find longterm effects, such as increasing the risk of cancer, damage to the circulatory system or the brain.
Overall, I think we must take actions immediately for solutions, but I won't particularly worry about this problem and I'll continue buying bottled water. It's not unlike the air pollution in the 20th century, one has to live with it.
Nevertheless, "microplastic is going to kill all of us" surely is going to be the trope of the next decade.
The other problem, in the US at least, is that many coffee shops and restaurants are sellers of a popular brand of tea that comes with plastic mesh bags (Might Leaf) yet have not thought through/do not understand (/do not care?) they are mixing compostable matter with non-compostable matter. The results are tea in the trash or plastic in compostables.
It's stunning how there's an ancient, effective, wasteless, flavorless, attractive and elegant alternative to tea bags that western culture simply has no clue about. The Chinese and other asian cultures have been using it for thousands of years. (Or at least since the Ming dynasty, and far earlier if you include the "tea bowl" precursors.)
There is zero need for a tea bag when you have such a simple, elegant, and effective ceramic dish in which to steep tea.
That and the fact that tea bag tea is virtually synonymous with ignorance of the full range of quality that exists in the world of tea, as far I can tell. The good teas from around the world just do not come in tea bags, and routinely when I share them with friends who think tea comes in tea bags, they are blown away.
Forget about Lipton, Celestial Seasonings, anything that comes in tea bags, or has a name brand on it.
If there's a Chinatown or international market street in your area, go there. Ask around for where there's a tea shop.
A good tea shop will offer to make you some tea when you walk in. Accept and try whatever they give you. Buy what you like. There are hundreds of varieties of green tea alone, not to mention white, black, oolong, pu-erh, etc.
Tea is sold loose and by weight. When you make it, you can put water just off the boil in a tall glass with the tea leaves. They will sink to the bottom and you don't need to filter it. Later you can get more sophisticated about your brewing and buy a clay teapot, or a special glass flask with a pop-in stainless steel strainer at the mouth.
If you live in the DC Area, Victoria (who runs Meimei Fine Teas) hosts tea classes, and is happy to share stores of her annual tea sourcing trips to China. Really high quality products from a trustworthy source.
There's something really special about knowing trusting an individual (rather than a company) to deliver you a fantastic product and experience.
Lipton tea in mainstream US stores has always suffered by comparison to the English brands. (Tea-drinking is relatively uncommon in the US.)
If they even have any, many US restaurants will often serve tea that's obviously been open-to-the-atmosphere for a long time. They just don't know any better.
In the northern US, we could border-cross to buy Canadian teabags which were far better than US bags ... owing, no doubt, to the number of Canadians of UK-extraction. (Which may also explain why most Canadian beer is better.)
The good thing, if you can call it that, is PET and nylon (what these silk teabags are made of) are some of the least reactive and most human-safe plastics you can put in your body.
One should also mention that tea is an imported good in most developed countries. It's externalities and environmental impact go far beyond microplastics.
[+] [-] simias|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] roboys|6 years ago|reply
After hearing this I decided, if it's not full loose leaf, I don't drink it. We found that companies like Elephant Chateau (http://elephantchateau.com) deliver the 3 highest grades of tea direct from Ceylon mountain estates with the option for plant-based pyramid bags (soilon) or a free stainless steel infuser.
Bonus, the tea actually tastes like tea and is tasty enough to drink plain unlike Lipton dust. It always funny to hear people promote all the health benefits of tea then turn around and dump 100 grams of sugar into a cup to make it palatable.
[+] [-] pmontra|6 years ago|reply
Luckily I had been using leaves to make my tea at home. Probably the average quality one.
[+] [-] NeedMoreTea|6 years ago|reply
Tried Liptons once. On our very first trip to the USA, we needed a decent cup of tea. Visited Walmart, bought really expensive pack of Liptons which I think was one of just a very few teas among millions of coffees. Made tea, instantly regretted it. Surprising considering it's from Unilever who make the UK's best seller: PG, which is OK but a bit weak.
The place we stayed that leg got most of a pack of free tea bags, and we found somewhere that could make tea - without ice or lemon. :)
Thankfully plastic tea bags don't seem to have become popular here. Asda (Walmart) did them for a while, so we switched brands.
[+] [-] smacktoward|6 years ago|reply
But if you have to go with a one-time-use container, a paper bag seems like an improvement on both counts versus a plastic one. The article indicates that the only reason some brands go with the plastic bags is to appear more "premium," which if true is a great testament for how people are willing to strangle both themselves and the planet in order to accrue a couple extra status points.
[+] [-] joshvm|6 years ago|reply
I've not seen an appreciable difference in brew time using loose leaf. A mug of Earl Gray should be done in a few minutes either way.
[+] [-] lm28469|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dragontamer|6 years ago|reply
This is indeed my experience as well. Still, the convenience factor of Lipton tea cannot be understated.
I'm personally willing to bring in my own tea, metal strainers + teaspoon measurement to my workplace for example (hot-water is usually available in most offices). But that's probably too much for a lot of people.
In contrast, you can usually get Lipton Tea from the office supplies, use some paper cups (also office supplies), and get to tea drinking without having to buy the supplies.
[+] [-] tripzilch|6 years ago|reply
I was gonna say, they literally taste worse than the cheaper paper-based tea bags. I mean loose leaf is nice, but those plastic pyramid things are just shit.
[+] [-] sharadov|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sgt|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mikestew|6 years ago|reply
And now plastic in my tea. The wife's got to have a tea strainer in here somewhere...
[+] [-] okcando|6 years ago|reply
I wouldn't have even suspected the tea bags themselves. I assume some of them are still made with natural fibers but how would you know?
[+] [-] gniv|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DoctorOetker|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] buckminster|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SeaSeaRider|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AdmiralAsshat|6 years ago|reply
I'm thinking specifically of stuff like Harney and Sons, that you often see for sale at your nearest B&N or Starbucks: https://www.amazon.com/Harney-Sons-Hot-Cinnamon-Spice/dp/B00...
I also see grocery-store versions at Target and such. Those appear to be the ones that employee the plastic triangle satchet. The cheaper stuff, from what I can tell, is still using paper.
[+] [-] krumpet|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] julianz|6 years ago|reply
https://www.countryliving.com/uk/create/food-and-drink/news/...
[+] [-] city41|6 years ago|reply
I was happy to see Celestial Seasonings have no plastic. They also don't have the string, tag or staple, which I always appreciated.
[+] [-] shanecleveland|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Birch-san|6 years ago|reply
Dragonwell is a nice take on green tea. It's easy to drink endlessly, and a good choice for your main drink.
Keemun is a subtle take on black tea. Good to have in the rotation when you've bored of breakfast tea.
Rose black tea is a great treat to rest with. I've found it hard to acquire lately.
Gyokuro is a super expensive green tea, impressive for special occasions.
Matcha powder is nice if you're in the mood, and looks great sprinkled on a coffee.
I tend to buy from Tea Makers of London.
[+] [-] madhadron|6 years ago|reply
Sadly, going to an upscale tea place in an urban area does not guarantee you decent tea, nor are places consistent. There are places that have nice blacks and greens, but utterly miserable rooibos (this is quite common).
[+] [-] binarypaean|6 years ago|reply
I mostly drink [Jasmine Pearl](https://www.rishi-tea.com/product/jasmine-pearl-green-tea/lo...) or [Matcha Gyokuro](https://www.rishi-tea.com/product/matcha-gyokuro-japanese-gr...). If I want a no-caff drink instead, something based on [Rooibos](https://www.rishi-tea.com/product/ginger-lime-rooibos-organi...) or [Turmeric](https://www.rishi-tea.com/product/turmeric-ginger-organic-ca...).
If you like darker teas, their black, oolong or pu'er teas may be your speed.
[+] [-] munchbunny|6 years ago|reply
For Chinese teas easily found in the US, dragon well (longjing) and iron buddha (tie guan yin) are very drinkable green teas. Iron Buddha tends to taste a bit more metallic, leafy, and sweet, Dragon Well tends to have a warmer flavor with a tiny hint of savoriness. Both are much lighter in flavor than, say, Earl Grey, which makes them very drinkable even in large quantities, but if you're used to Earl Grey you might not be able to taste these teas. If you want a stronger, more earthy, less leafy flavor, you can find puerh fairly easily. There's a very large range of quality for puerh, so this can be a rabbit hole. As a general rule, you should only buy loose leaf for Chinese tea varieties. I've had dragon well in a bag/sachet before and it tastes like a poor facsimile.
I specifically didn't mention Jasmine because Jasmine tea is often a lower grade of quality in the US, which has the downside of tasting too leafy/bitter/heavy on tannin. If you find a higher quality loose leaf Jasmine, it's also a very drinkable tea that you might like.
In general, I personally prefer leaf-only-no-added-flavors teas, but everyone's tastes differ. What I recommend to everyone who asks is to try a lot of varieties from different countries (mainly China, Japan, India, and try white, green, red, and black varieties), try a few of the flowery/herbal/fruity blends, and settle on whatever you like.
[+] [-] kzrdude|6 years ago|reply
The aroma of it is something completely different than cheaper green teas.
[+] [-] deeg|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] a_t48|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] toastal|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] captainredbeard|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jonathannorris|6 years ago|reply
They use biodegradeable corn starch based tea bags.
[+] [-] powerset|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fitzroy|6 years ago|reply
I'm curious to try some others mentioned in the comments.
[+] [-] mikebonnell|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ljcn|6 years ago|reply
https://phys.org/news/2019-06-consume-credit-card-worth-plas...
[+] [-] cmoscoe|6 years ago|reply
Is there any good research on if it's a problem? What are the effects on humans of consuming them? What are the effects on aquatic ecosystems, etc?
[+] [-] mijoharas|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mekoka|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tripzilch|6 years ago|reply
this is a misleading title. if one microplastic is a thousand nanoplastics then obviously it's going to be trillions of nanoplastics and billions of microplastics.
> "We were shocked when we saw billions of particles in a single cup of tea," she said.
So if you get this "bubble tea" with tapioca balls in it, are they macro particles?
[+] [-] _carl_jung|6 years ago|reply
The concerns with plastics that break up into many smaller pieces and enter the body and wider ecosystem are different (and potentially worse) than the concerns of the impacts of a single macro piece.
[+] [-] segfaultbuserr|6 years ago|reply
This is the big question. I think people around the world have been ingesting microplastic for 30 years or longer, yet there's no reported case of any direct toxic effects. So I guess microplastic doesn't have immediately effects on health, but I won't be surprised if future studies find longterm effects, such as increasing the risk of cancer, damage to the circulatory system or the brain.
Overall, I think we must take actions immediately for solutions, but I won't particularly worry about this problem and I'll continue buying bottled water. It's not unlike the air pollution in the 20th century, one has to live with it.
Nevertheless, "microplastic is going to kill all of us" surely is going to be the trope of the next decade.
See also:
* Microplastics found in 93% of bottled water tested in global study https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16793888
* Microplastics found in 90 percent of table salt https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18248471
* Microplastics Are Blowing in the Wind https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19672514
* Microplastics found in supermarket fish, shellfish https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14245133
[+] [-] sleavey|6 years ago|reply
[1] https://www.countryliving.com/uk/create/food-and-drink/news/...
[+] [-] meristem|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yetanotherjosh|6 years ago|reply
It's stunning how there's an ancient, effective, wasteless, flavorless, attractive and elegant alternative to tea bags that western culture simply has no clue about. The Chinese and other asian cultures have been using it for thousands of years. (Or at least since the Ming dynasty, and far earlier if you include the "tea bowl" precursors.)
There is zero need for a tea bag when you have such a simple, elegant, and effective ceramic dish in which to steep tea.
That and the fact that tea bag tea is virtually synonymous with ignorance of the full range of quality that exists in the world of tea, as far I can tell. The good teas from around the world just do not come in tea bags, and routinely when I share them with friends who think tea comes in tea bags, they are blown away.
[+] [-] inimino|6 years ago|reply
Forget about Lipton, Celestial Seasonings, anything that comes in tea bags, or has a name brand on it.
If there's a Chinatown or international market street in your area, go there. Ask around for where there's a tea shop.
A good tea shop will offer to make you some tea when you walk in. Accept and try whatever they give you. Buy what you like. There are hundreds of varieties of green tea alone, not to mention white, black, oolong, pu-erh, etc.
Tea is sold loose and by weight. When you make it, you can put water just off the boil in a tall glass with the tea leaves. They will sink to the bottom and you don't need to filter it. Later you can get more sophisticated about your brewing and buy a clay teapot, or a special glass flask with a pop-in stainless steel strainer at the mouth.
[+] [-] piercebot|6 years ago|reply
+ https://www.meimeitea.com/
+ https://yunnansourcing.com/
If you live in the DC Area, Victoria (who runs Meimei Fine Teas) hosts tea classes, and is happy to share stores of her annual tea sourcing trips to China. Really high quality products from a trustworthy source.
There's something really special about knowing trusting an individual (rather than a company) to deliver you a fantastic product and experience.
[+] [-] 8bitsrule|6 years ago|reply
If they even have any, many US restaurants will often serve tea that's obviously been open-to-the-atmosphere for a long time. They just don't know any better.
In the northern US, we could border-cross to buy Canadian teabags which were far better than US bags ... owing, no doubt, to the number of Canadians of UK-extraction. (Which may also explain why most Canadian beer is better.)
[+] [-] hammock|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ciconia|6 years ago|reply