Tea For One

Hello!

Great item for tea lovers today.

Coffee lovers swear that grinding your own beans makes a better cup of coffee (I wouldn’t know…not a coffee fan). Well, there is a similar rule in the world of tea…loose leaf is better than tea bags. An earlier post described how loose tea dances in the water when steeping allowing leaves to open fully and give more flavor than those confined in a bag. We (Xyra, my sisters, and I) like both loose and bagged tea, but today we will focus on loose leaf.

There are several ways to prepare loose leaf tea. The most common is to put the tea in an infuser and drop the infuser in your teapot to steep. Infusers come in many different styles. Here are a few.

The fun shapes from left to right: (top row) diver, ducky, flower, man (lower row) monkey, robot, teapot, T-Rex.

Plus you can use the glass, infuser teapots (see earlier posts).

Our friend, Lady Marvin of the Lamp Post, introduced us to a really neat infuser teapot you can use when making one cup. It’s IngenuiTEA: the ingenious teapot. Xyra googled it and found Wegman’s grocery store carries it. Yay!

[I apologize for the quality of the following pictures. They are a little dark and a tad blurry.]

We used Assam Breakfast Indian tea today. 

[Note: this is poor packaging for tea; it should be in an airtight container or tin.]

This is what it looks like before water is added.

Dancing leaves.

Ready to “pour.”

This is how it pours. Cool, huh? [I hope the video works. It's just 1 second long.]

[Just in case the above appears only as a white block...you put the teapot on top of the mug and the tea drains down into the mug. It really is cool to watch.]

Oops! I misjudged the size of that mug, but wanted to use a clear mug so you could see better. 

See how the sugar and milk are automatically mixed when the tea is added.

The box says, “works with any cup.” It does not fit on this Longaberger mug because of the lip and diameter of the opening. 3” maximum (well 3¼”).

It’s really a great system and fun to use. There is one drawback…emptying the used tea leaves. They tend to stick. So we use a spoon or baking, rubber scraper to get them all out. It’s well worth the small clean up effort to get a great cup of tea.

Thank you for the hint, Lady Marvin!

Raising our cups to you.

Have a lovely day!

Talk to you again soon.

Melody