Posts Tagged ‘tea infuser’
June 1, 2010 | 
Author Brewing tea means that you have to bring camelia sinensis (or whatever plant or mixture you\’re using) together with hot water (unless you’re making iced tea, where cold water options are available).
It’s convenient and aesthetic to do this in a teapot, but any heat-proof vessel available to you will do. When the tea is ready, you pour it through a tea strainer into a serving vessel or directly into the tea cup. Appropriate strainers for this task are small and have a fine mesh. They’re usually made of metal, but I have seen bamboo ones.
Another option for brewing tea is to place the plant material into an infuser and bring the infuser into contact with the hot water. Tea infusers sometimes come as accessories with teapots or mugs. These are usually glass, metal, or ceramic. Or infusers can be acquired separately for use with mugs, teapots, or cups.
The options I like are tea filter bags (paper or cloth), infuser baskets (which are like deep strainers that sit on the lip of a cup, mug, or teapot, resting in the hot water), and the tea press (which is identical to a coffee press but used exclusively for tea).
The option I don’t like is infuser balls or infuser spoons; these cramp the tea and don’t let all the flavor infuse into the water.
Tea sold in commercially prepared tea bags is convenient but either of lesser quality (tea dust rather than broken leaf) or much more expensive, in the long run, than buying looseleaf and using one of the brewing methods I’ve mentioned here.
Roland Petrov
Posted in 
Tags: 
Some tea drinkers have them; I don’t. Customers routinely ask for them, and then I have some explaining to do. I don’t like tea balls and infuser spoons, those metal objects with holes in them that you fill with tea and then drop into your cup for infusion, for one simple reason:
most of them aren’t big enough.
For them to work properly, you’d need really big balls so that the leaves inside can unfurl without being cramped. A cramped ball means insipid tea as not all of the leaf is having contact with the water; in other words, the tea doesn’t infuse properly.
A better option is a tea sac (like the one dunked in the glass tea cup in the photo in the header of this website). A tea sac which is a fillable paper filter large enough to allow the tea leaves to open up completely, holding nothing back.
Other options are teapots or mugs with removable infusers, or just do what I do: brew your tea in whatever is available (I personally have a tea pot) and then strain the tea into your cup using a cheap metal strainer that will last for ages.
So while some tea drinkers use their balls, those who resist them will enjoy a better cup of tea.
Roland