Throughout my website, I discourage the drinking of cheap tea bags. After all, life is just too short for the kind of deplorable brew you usually obtain from the miniscule particles (Particle size of this kind of tea is around 0.7mm for dust (There is no ‘cleaning dust’ in your tea bag. This is the industry’s own term for what goes into your tea bag); there is also ‘Superfine Dust’, but this tends to clog the pores of the bags too much) used in tea bags. It was for this reason I was asked which tea bag I could recommend, if any at all.
The tea bag has a right of existence – to a certain degree. What you obtain from it is
- a colour that develops quickly in your mug
- a basic kind of taste that develops quickly in your mug (but you may need to add sugar to reinforce the aroma)
In other words, you get a quick fix, and there are these moments in life when you just do not have the time to brew a proper cuppa from loose leave tea.
The problem that you are then facing is that you would like to treat yourself, but which tea bag do you reach for when you find yourself in such a terrible dilemma ?
Mariage Frères
(https://www.mariagefreres.com/FR/2-english-breakfast-mousselines-de-coton-TB702.html)
Mariage Frères is a luxury tea temple with headquarters in Paris. Any of their shops throughout the world is well worth a visit. This is not your typical tea bag producer, but they make very nice muslin tea bags. Note that these usually contain better than dust quality tea leaves and thus your Mariage Frères tea bag may take a little longer than a cheap tea bag to develop flavour. They are generally a little tightly packed and do not leave enough room for the tea leaves to fully open or the leaves at the centre to be fully immersed in water, but they do not disappoint.
TWG
(https://twgtea.com/productsdetails/english-breakfast-tea-1)
If you first visit a Mariage Frères shop and then a TWG shop, you will be taken aback by how similar the two store concepts are. Having said this, MF was founded in 1854 in Paris, and TWG was founded in Singapore but not in 1837 (!!). Another aspect the two differ in is their tea bags: Both contain as good quality as goes into a tea bag, but the TWG bags are individually wrapped and sealed, which may make them more comfortable to use singly or to carry with you.
Sirocco
(https://www.sirocco.ch/ceylon-sunrise.html)
The Swiss Sirocco tea bag has three advantages both over the standard and the more developed tea bag, and is thus considered the most modern of all tea bags at the moment.
Sirocco bags
- are made from bio-degradable corn starch and even the single thread used to tie the pouch shut is unbleached cotton. (A far cry from the days when tea bags were sealed with a little bit of glue :-( ).
- contain organic tea
- are see-through
The last point is where their major strength lies. The fact that Sirocco offer a look into their bag forces them to fill it with higher than usual grade tea. If you cut open your supermarket tea bag, you will find it difficult to identify the powdery product as tea. With Sirocco teag bags, you see what you get.
Althaus Tee
(https://www.althaustea.de/de/pyra-packs/schwarzer-tee/30/english-breakfast-st.-andrews)
Tea is the second most often drunk beverage throughout the world. (Yes, we drink more tea than alcohol. The liquid that beats tea and is ranked number one is water). You can expect to find tea in every region of the world, and if you have tea bags in your luggage because you have become addicted to your kind of brew, then beware of taking some of the latest Althaus Tee to Scotland. Althaus bags are also 100% bio-degradable, but they used to have a black tea that was dubbed “English Superior” (which may have been a bit of a mouthful to pronounce for some non-English speakers) and which was recently renamed into “English Breakfast – St. Andrews”. That’s a little unfortunate, I’d say, as the St. Andrews that readily springs to mind does not lie in England and is unlikely to be the producer of this tea. I was going to suggest you add a little bit of whisky, but on second thought, in a country where you’d already receive a rap over the knuckles for accidentally calling their national drink ‘whiskey’, I don’t think you’ll get away with mixing a wee dram with tea . Quite on the contrary.
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