Loose Leaf Or Tea Bags?

Tea bags. Just the phrase itself is often enough to inspire disgust in the hearts of ardent tea lovers. But are these bogeymen of the tea world[i] really so bad?

The general reasoning behind the ‘bags are bad’ attitude lies in the fact that yes, many tea bags sold by leading brands in the shops are full of crushed leaves that have lost much of their finer qualities during the crushing process. As the leaves are cut and crushed to fit into the tea bag, some of the best parts of the leaf are often lost, meaning that what you end up steeping in your tea cup may not be the wholesome brew you expect it to be. On top of this, those opaque teabags you find on supermarket shelves have sometimes been known to also contain goodies that aren’t quite tea, i.e. dust, sweepings and various other nasties that get brushed up along with the crushed tea. There’s no doubt that it is far easier to get away with selling inferior tea in a tea bag than it is with loose leaf.

But this doesn’t necessarily mean that all tea bags are bad and that all loose leaf are good. It really does depend on who has blended the tea and what materials they have used. As most tea lovers who are reading this post are probably already aware, many tea bags – certainly many conventional tea bags – contain micro amounts of plastic, which are released into your cup along with your nicely brewed tea. In fact, quite alarmingly, recent studies have revealed that “people living in North America apparently ingest the equivalent of a credit card’s worth of plastic every week”[ii] just through the various plastics that leech their way into the food we eat, the liquids we drink - even the air we breathe. It’s becoming somewhat of a global concern.

For this reason, many tea brands, including Tea Now, sell their blends in 100% corn fibre silken pyramid bags. Being 100% plant based, these bags are biodegradable and do not release harmful plastics into your tea, whilst the pyramid style bag allows the tea contents inside to swim around and expand. This allows those wonderful ingredients to release their full potential into your tea cup.

As we uncovered in last week’s blog post, there is also a vast variance in the quality of ingredients a blender may use to create their product – loose or bagged. We also looked at the fact that high quality herbal ingredients are quite potent and should be blended by an expert so that consumers are not unknowingly damaging their health by consuming too much of any particular herb that may also have been blended in the wrong ratios.

So, at least as far as herbal teas are concerned, the question becomes: Should high quality herbal blends be sold as loose leaf?

Well let’s not get too narky here. Of course there’s usually nothing wrong with your everyday loose leaf peppermint or rooibos. What we are really talking about are those blends that contain ingredients such as ginseng, valerian, spearmint, senna, red clover, licorice, fenugreek, burdock - and yes, sometimes even lavender and chamomile – just to name a small few. Did you know that hibiscus, one of the darlings of many artisan herbal blends on the market, is a powerful diuretic? And that it should not be drunk whilst also taking medication for fluid retention? But these things are very rarely communicated.

At this point you may be thinking, well I always drink herbal blends and I’m fine. You are overreacting. My response is this: If you are drinking various herbal teas all the time, in random quantities and you are not seeing noticeable repercussions, it could very well be that you are not realising the true effect the teas are having on your body or the quality of tea you are drinking is not high enough to even have an effect, good or bad. Which leads right back to my original point: The variation in ingredients available for blenders to use is vast and whilst it is certainly easier to hide bad tea in a tea bag, even loose leaf blends can be rubbish.

Because proper herbal teas are so potent, I personally prefer to only drink blends that I know have been formulated expertly. Which is why I love Tea Now. I fully support Tea Now’s choice to sell their tea in professionally apportioned biodegradable silken pyramid bags, because with Tea Now, not only do I know that what I’m drinking is high quality, I can also be assured that the ingredients inside have been measured out in their perfect quantities. This means I don’t have to concern myself with wondering if I’m scooping the correct amount of each herb out of a bag of loose leaf. Don’t get me wrong, I do love loose leaf teas, I really do - but there are certain places for them and my herbal tea remedy stash is not one of them.

* Tania Pritchard is a tea enthusiast with an interest in health and wellness. We love her take on all things tea & she is a regular contributor to our blog.

Tania is not a qualified health practitioner. Always consult a heath professional before deciding if a health product is right for you.