TAKE TEA AND SEE

The following article appeared in the NY Times on Weds, Sept 13th

Tea’s Got a Brand New Bag

By FLORENCE FABRICANT

Published: September 13, 2006 – 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.

CHANGE IS BREWING Harney & Sons’s pyramid-shape pouches hold longer tea leaves.

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 Fr res have also introduced tea bags.

We decided to put some of our teas in tea bags because thats 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 companys
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 its appealing to new consumers as well as tea lovers.
Liptons 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, Liptons 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 Liptons flavored varieties were entry
level teas. And they are a far cry from Harney & Sonss Dragon Pearl
Jasmine or Mighty Leafs 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. Liptons 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.

Liptons Pyramid will bring premium tea to the masses, Mr. Cheetham
said.

That is the very attitude that drove the companys founder, Thomas
Lipton, an English tea merchant. By buying his own tea estates in the
late 1800s, 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 1920s 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 cups 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.