by Karen Douglas
Are you a loose tea leaf connoisseur or are tea bags your preferred method of making a cup of tea? This month’s Templin topic is looking at tea infusers and the history of tea drinking.
Tea has been around for about 5000 years in China. In the beginning though, tea was only used in ritual offerings. Then, tea leaves were eaten as a vegetable, or used in medicine.
Until the Han Dynasty more than 2,000 years ago, tea was a new drink, but it took a couple of chance opportunities for the western world to learn about it. Firstly, in the early 1600s, European explorers brought back small amounts of tea following their contact with the Chinese. Secondly, King Charles II married Princess Catherine of Braganza of Portugal in 1662. Catherine had already enjoyed many cups of tea and it was she who encouraged it to be consumed within her royal circle in England.
Tea was brought to England in ever increasing quantities in the seventeenth century and by the late 18th century black tea had become far more popular than green.
Following massive cultivation of tea in India in the following century, there was plenty of tea for everyone.
Now that a large proportion of the population of the United Kingdom, America and Europe had taken up drinking tea, preferred methods of making the tea came on to the market.
Traditionally, a measured amount of tea leaves was put into a teapot. When boiling water was added, the mixture was allowed to steep until it had reached the desired strength.
Loose tea leaves unfurling in a tea pot are beautiful, but if the tea is left for too long, the brew gets too strong for some tastes. Tea leaves also ended up in the drinker’s cup or mouth.
To counter this, the tea strainer was invented which kept the leaves out of the cup.
Finally, the pot had to be emptied of sodden leaves. About now, we see the introduction of infusers…little metal egg shape or round metal balls with perforations.
These removable containers went some way to solving the difficulty of emptying the pot and also enabled the tea leaves to be removed to prevent the tea from becoming overly strong. The metal infusers had small chains attached to make it easy to remove the infuser ball from the pot.
Our metal infuser is egg shaped with perforated faces.
It has a long handle which meant it could be stood upright in the pot and easily removed or rested in a cup. It works by squeezing the handle which opens the perforated faces allowing for the measure of tea to be held within the egg shape and also to be emptied quickly and easily.
That should be enough about tea and infusers, but the need for tea to be contained while brewing also led to an invention that is probably universal in its acceptance. That invention was the tea bag.
It is thought that an American tea merchant Thomas Sullivan started to send samples of tea to his customers in small silken bags around 1908. Some assumed that these were supposed to be used in the same way as the metal infusers, by putting the entire bag into the pot, rather than emptying out the contents. It was by accident that the tea bag was born!
Tea firms say that today, more than 90 percent of tea sales are tea bags. The beauty of the tea bag is its convenience: you can make a cup of tea as easily as a cup of instant coffee, without losing any of the delicious, natural taste.
I wonder what we’ll be using in a hundred years’ time?
