Results: The Roots of the Tea - It's in the Bag

During the 19th century, tea drinking played an important role in social life, and new tea traditions began to develop in America as the beverage's popularity grew. Iced tea originated at the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis, Missouri. A tea merchant from abroad had intended to provide visitors with free hot tea samples. However, due to the unusually hot weather, it was not a big hit. To promote sales, he asked a nearby ice cream vendor for some ice, which he dumped into the brewed tea. Thus, the American iced tea tradition was born. Today, iced tea makes up around 80% of the entire U.S. tea market sales. Do you drink .....?

There's some debate about who invented the very first tea bag. The original tea bags were handmade, hand stitched muslin or silk bags, much like Mighty Leaf's handcrafted, artisan tea pouches. Patents for tea bags existed as early as 1903. No matter who got to it first, the invention solved two problems at once: how to make single serving tea-brewing more convenient, and how to reduce cleanup—throwing out a teabag is much easier than cleaning loose leaves out of a pot. The simple teabag has required no modification since its invention a century ago—and a century from now, it's a safe bet we'll be brewing our cuppa the same exact way. Did you know that the original Tea Bags were made of Silk?

Roberta C. Lawson and Mary Molaren of Milwaukee filed for a patent for a "tea leaf holder" that also resembles what we use today. "By this means," they wrote, "only so much of tea-leaves is used as is required for the single cup of tea," making less waste. As they detailed in their application, the bag needed to hold the tea leaves together so that they didn't float into the drinker's mouth, but not so tightly that the water could not circulate through them to be infused. Their design used a stitched mesh fabric; Sullivan, too, would later switch from silk to gauze after he saw that the weave of silk was too fine for optimal infusing. Were you aware there was a patent on the tea bag design?

Tea manufacturer Lipton, which is the world's biggest tea company, celebrated its 150th anniversary of the Lipton's empire on 10th May 2021. Though Thomas Lipton's initial venture wasn't the first to use bags for individual servings of tea, the company does claim credit for the idea of printing brewing instructions on the tags. And, while the brand has made a few tweaks over the years, its basic tea bag has remained the same for six decades. Even the contents have hardly changed: "The amount of black tea that Lipton uses in a teabag has stayed the same since the 'flo-thru' bag was introduced in 1952," explains John Cheetham, Lipton Tea Master. (That's about 30 leaves per bag.) Have you ever used Lipton Tea?

Some have tried to revolutionize tea-steeping; Keurig, for instance, has even manufactured tea pods for its K-Cup machines, taking the wait time out of steeping. Others have tried to de-evolutionize tea steeping; there are loose-leaf purists just as there are pour-over coffee enthusiasts. But the teabag is so brilliant, it really does not need improvement; from Bigelow to Twinings, the little mesh bag stapled to a string works every time. As John Harney of Harney & Sons once said, all a teabag needs to be lifted to perfection is "furiously boiling water" and five minutes' steeping—"no more, no less." Have you ever used a K-cup to make a cup of tea?