Tea’s Got a Brand New Bag By FLORENCE FABRICANT
THE tea bag, a clever enough idea at first, went terribly awry somewhere along the way, at least in the view of people who love to savor their tea. Now it is in the process of large-scale reinvention, and some of those who currently shun it with almost ostentatious disdain are very likely to be won over.
At age 100 or so, the old bag is increasingly being filled with fine whole leaf tea, the kind connoisseurs brew in their teapots, and the bag itself has been redesigned in shapes that are not only elegant but constructed to allow those flavorful leaves to show what they’ve got.
With tea sales in the United States now four times what they were a decade ago — about $6.2 billion annually, according to the Tea Association of the USA, a trade group — the American tea drinker seems ready for a change for the better.
The change, some say, is overdue. Look closely at a conventional tea bag in your cupboard or in the paper cup from the local deli. Chances are that instead of leaves it is filled with indistinguishable bits, the detritus left after tea leaves are sifted and graded. The tea industry calls it dust, and the beverage it makes is likely to be rusty-looking and often bitterly tannic. But it no longer has to be, nor is it necessary to brew a whole pot of tea to achieve something better tasting.
Perhaps the surest sign that the tea world is changing is this: Lipton, the world’s largest tea company and a division of Unilever, will start selling tea bags containing long leaf teas in supermarkets nationwide next month.
Instead of paper, the leaves will be enveloped by nylon mesh bags in a delicate pyramid shape.
Lipton is following the lead of American businesses like Harney & Sons, Mighty Leaf, Adagio and the Highland Tea Company, which for several years have sold tea bags filled with high-quality full-leaf teas, ones with complex, often floral, herbaceous, spicy or fruity nuances.
Smelling a trend, new companies, like Revolution Tea, Numi Tea, Two Leaves and a Bud, and Tea Forté, have formed expressly to sell fine teas in tea bags. Harrisons & Crosfield, from England, and the luxury Parisian tea purveyors Le Palais des Thés and Mariage Frères have also introduced tea bags.
“We decided to put some of our teas in tea bags because that’s the way most people drink tea,” said Wanja Michuki, the president of the Highland Tea Company, in Montclair, N.J., which sells fine teas from Kenya, the leading exporter of tea worldwide.
James Wong, a Unilever vice president and general manager of Lipton, in Englewood Cliffs, N.J., said the company’s research showed that “every consumer is becoming a gourmand.’’
“They want long leaf tea, but they can be intimidated by buying and brewing it,” he said. “We saw an opportunity to simplify it, making it convenient and accessible, and it’s appealing to new consumers as well as tea lovers.”
Lipton’s new line, called Pyramid, took the company two years to develop. It offers six varieties of long leaf tea, all but one flavored with bits of dried fruit or other seasonings. Only Black Pearl, a black tea blend, is unflavored.
“Consumers have reacted positively to the flavorings,” said John Cheetham, Lipton’s Royal Estates tea master, who selects and blends teas. “And we have Black Pearl to appeal to the purist.”
Even the best tea companies have introduced flavored teas in response to consumer demand, but over the years their reputations have been based on the quality of their oolongs, Darjeelings and senchas.
Mr. Cheetham acknowledged that Lipton’s flavored varieties were “entry level” teas. And they are a far cry from Harney & Sons’s Dragon Pearl Jasmine or Mighty Leaf’s Darjeeling Choice Estate, which are sold in bags that cost 30 cents to $2 each and available at tea shops, fancy food shops and online. Lipton’s Pyramid teas, at $3.49 for 20 tea bags, cost less than 20 cents a cup. Ordinary tea bags average 2 to 8 cents a cup.
“Lipton’s Pyramid will bring premium tea to the masses,” Mr. Cheetham said.
That is the very attitude that drove the company’s founder, Thomas Lipton, an English tea merchant. By buying his own tea estates in the late 1800’s, he made tea, which had been an aristocratic beverage, more affordable and popular.
Thomas Sullivan, the New York tea merchant who is credited with inventing the tea bag about 100 years ago, used the bags at first to send samples to his customers. The idea caught on, and by the 1920’s the tea bag was commercially established.
But companies began compromising quality, and before long the little paper pouches were filled with the lowest grades of tea. Consumers did not object. In fact, they liked the fact that the minute particles in tea bags required but a few seconds in hot water to produce deeply colored, strong flavored liquid.
In 1929 Lipton began packing tea in paper tea bags. In 1954 the company introduced its patented double-wall tea bag, which exposed more of the tea to the hot water and took even less time to brew.
Brewing tea from fine tea leaves takes longer, as much as five minutes, for the infusion to develop. And the leaves themselves require more space to unfurl, which is why the better teas are put in pyramid-shape bags, or larger pouches, often made of silk, muslin or nylon mesh (and some hand-sewn). You can see the leaves swell as they come in contact with the hot water.
Like coffee lovers who moved up from making instant coffee to grinding their own estate-grown beans fresh for each cup, many American tea drinkers have graduated to whole leaf teas. Though there are myriad gadgets on the market, like little metal infusers, for brewing a single cup from whole tea leaves, they do not eliminate the chore of cleaning up the soggy remains. Recognizing the demand for convenience, Ito En, a Japanese tea company that has a store on Madison Avenue, has introduced fine nylon mesh bags, $1 each, that can be filled with a cup’s worth of tea, brewed and discarded.
Somewhat surprisingly, English tea companies appear to be the slowest to catch on to the trend of fine tea in tea bags. The English often drink tea with milk and sugar, so they like it dark and strong, just the way cheap tea bags make it. “The English consumer is less adventurous than the American,” Mr. Cheetham said.
Until recently, Americans considered the English to be the standard-bearers for proper tea drinking. But the influence of Japan, which was a bigger supplier of tea to the American market before World War II, has grown in recent years. Many Americans got their first taste of green tea at a sushi bar and have come to appreciate its refined delicacy and earthiness. Since 1998 sales of green tea have increased at a faster rate in America than any other kind of loose or bagged tea.
Joseph P. Simrany, the president of the Tea Association of the USA, which is based in Manhattan, said tea sales are projected to grow 10 percent a year for “the foreseeable future,” fueled in part by ready-to-drink bottled iced tea and by an increasing belief that tea, especially green tea, is healthful. Tea bag sales are lumped in with figures for loose teas, so there are no statistics for the growth of the tea bag segment of the market. But, Mr. Simrany said, “the new tea bags are changing consumer attitudes toward tea; the snobbism is gone.”
And even though the better tea bags will produce an excellent cup of tea, some of the finer points of tea making have been lost, like the different water temperatures and steeping times required, depending on whether the tea is black, oolong or green. An exception is the tea made by Le Palais des Thés: a suggested temperature and brewing time is printed on the foil packets that contain the muslin tea bags. But how many tea drinkers pay attention to those arcane details anyway?
“People like good tea but not the work,” said Michael Harney, a vice president of Harney & Sons, in Millerton, N.Y., a company that his father, John, founded. “We see our customers switching from loose tea to sachets all the time now.”
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