There are many ways to make a decent cup of tea, but all of them
involve infusing leaves in hot water. Most tea today in Britain is
made using tea bags, which were invented in America a little over
100 years ago. There is nothing wrong with using a tea bag if all
you want is a cup of strong, milky black tea, but for any tea with
a flavour that has any depth or delicacy to it, tea bags are
usually a mistake - it is rare to find them made with really good
quality tea, they don't always give the tea enough space to infuse,
and poor-quality bags can interfere with the flavour of the tea. A
close cousin of the tea bag is the dedicated paper filter, made to brew
loose-leaf tea, which overcomes these disadvantages while retaining
most of the convenience of the tea bag.
The tea pot is the main
traditional vessel for tea-making wherever tea is made, coming in
wildly different shapes and sizes around the globe (and around our
shop). Some tea pots have built-in filters or infusers (which may
also work in cups), while others rely on the use of a separate
strainer - or the hope that enough of the tea will have settled
at the bottom of the pot by the time you come to pour it out. If
any leaves do end up in the cup, of course, you could always use
them to practice tasseomancy, the traditional art of tea-leaf
reading.
The simpler alternative is to brew the tea in the cup, but then
you face the question of how to keep the leaves from going into
your mouth along with the brew - not everybody is happy just
filtering the leaves out with their teeth! For this reason several
styles of in-cup infusers exist, each with advantages and
disadvantages.
One very neat and convenient solution is the tea-ball, either free-floating or with a handle; this allows you
to take the tea out when it's brewed, and put it aside without any
danger of spilling any loose wet tea. Try to make sure to get one
with enough space to get a decent brew out of your favourite teas -
many tea leaves unfurl and expand greatly in hot water, and if they
don't have enough room to move while they are infusing, the tea
will suffer slightly.
Another
approach is an open-topped infuser that sits in your cup while it
brews. These tend to give the tea a bit more space to move, and
have the added advantage that if you ever want to make a pot, they
can double as tea-strainers. The down sides are that no one infuser
in this style will fit every possible cup, and you need to be a bit
careful about where you put it down afterwards to avoid spilling
leaves anywhere. For this reason my very
favourite tea infuser (pictured) is one that combines a
wide brim with a fairly narrow mesh, and comes with its own
little dish to place it on once it's brewed. This is
especially welcome if you drink a lot of tea that gets infused
multiple times - any decent white,
green
or oolong
tea will stand up to several brews, and it is very nice to have
somewhere handy to keep the leaves between one brew and the
next!
by Fergus Ray Murray.
