Loose leaf or teabag

Put your nose over an open pouch of whole leaf tea before any water goes near it. Bergamot, or blackcurrant skins, or the dry hay smell of a good green. Now do the same with a teabag. There is almost nothing there.

That gap is not marketing. It is grading.

What is actually in the bag

After tea is processed it gets sorted by the size of what is left: whole leaf at the top, then broken leaf, then fannings, then dust. Teabags are mostly the small stuff, because small particles have a huge surface area and give up their colour fast.

The trouble is that speed of extraction is indiscriminate. It pulls the tannins out as quickly as the flavour, which is the dry, slightly biting finish most of us learned to cover with milk and sugar. Whole leaf gives up its flavour more slowly and in a rounder order. You taste the top notes before the body arrives, rather than everything at once.

Leaves need room

Whole rosebuds take about three times their dry volume to open properly. Long leaf black tea needs to turn over in the water. A teabag gives them a paper cell the size of a stamp, and then we squash it against the side of the mug with a spoon, which is the one thing guaranteed to make it bitter.

This is the entire case for loose leaf, and it is not a romantic one. Give the leaves room and they taste like what they are.

It takes no longer

The reason people stay with bags is a belief that loose leaf is slower. It is not. It is only slower without the right thing to brew it in, and that is a solved problem.

The Glass Tea Infuser sits in the mug you already own. A spoonful in, water on, lift it out. That is the same handful of seconds a bag takes, and you rinse it instead of binning it. The Easy-peasy Teapot does two cups at once with the strainer built in, so there is no spoon, no squashing, no fishing anything out. Both exist for exactly this reason. The office, the hotel room, the cup made one handed: the infuser travels, and it is quicker than waiting for somebody else's kettle to boil twice.

The one gram rule

Here is the part nobody puts on the packet, and we should have. One gram of tea per cup. That is a slightly heaped teaspoon for leafy blends and a level one for dense fruit pieces, into 200ml of water.

• Black tea: water just off the boil, three to four minutes.
• Green tea: let the kettle stand for two minutes first, then two to three minutes.
• Fruit and herbal: five minutes, and they will not turn bitter if you forget them.

Weigh it once. Look at what a gram actually is in your own spoon. You will never need the scales again.

What it costs

Our 15g size makes fifteen cups at £7. The 100g pantry size makes a hundred cups at £30. So somewhere between 30p and 47p a cup, depending on the size you buy.

For that you get the whole leaf, the smell before the water, a second flavour you did not know was in there, and with many blacks and greens a second steep out of the same spoonful.

The bag itself

Many teabags are sealed with a plastic, which is how they hold that pyramid shape in hot water. In 2019 a study from McGill University reported a single plastic teabag shedding billions of micro and nanoplastic particles into a cup. Germany's federal food safety institute then repeated the test, found dramatically fewer particles, and questioned the original method. The science is genuinely unsettled, so we will not make a claim out of it.

What we can say flatly: loose leaf has no bag. The leaves go on the compost.

Switching properly, in three steps

1. One piece of kit. The Glass Tea Infuser at £12 for a single mug, or the Easy-peasy Teapot at £32 if you make two cups at a time.
2. Two blends, not ten. One for the morning, one for after dinner. Overwhelm is what sends people back to the box.
3. One week. Try it once without milk, on day three, when you have got the gram right.

Then judge it. If the morning cup is better, you have changed one small thing for good.

Next, if you want the cold version of all this: the eight hour cup.

JoJo