Honestly, no tea that comes in teabags can really be called “good”. They’re designed to infuse in seconds for the impatient 1960’s accountant on their way to work.
Twinings tea , which is so horribly common in the USA, is laughable - it’s actually sponsored by Nescafé. (Mebbe)
A proper nice pre-warmed thick shelled ceramic pot, close to 100 degs C as you can manage, a good loose tea (doesn’t have to be expensive! No bag process you see!), pour in water as close to 100 degs C as possible, allow to steep for … oooohh … a while.
Almost all commercial espresso machines have a water tap on the steam boiler, and this produces water you can use for brewing tea, as in the boiler it is at a temperature above boiling.
I did shell out fifty bucks for some coffee made out of cat shit once. If I’m going to pay an absurd amount of money for something I’m going to eventually excrete, I want to at least get a story out of it.
There’s a ton of brands out there these days that use nice, whole leaf tea, in large, silk pyramid bags. Quality tea with plenty of room to properly infuse and circulate.
Now finding those on US store shelves is another story.
Both have piddling little bits of tea shake. And their “sachets” (which i think is just French for “bag”) are minuscule. PFAFF I SAY.
No I’ll drink both, and both are nice. But the products I’m thinking of have a “sachet” twice the size of the Harney’s pyramid and have legit whole leaf tea in it. Like leaves an inch or two long, legit gunpowder rolls etc. Same as you might buy loose from an actual Tea shop. Unfortunately names are escaping me at the moment. But we tried a bunch before settling on one at work. I’ve only seen the damn things at wholesale so they’re out there and some one is selling them. But I never see them at retail near me.
Far as I’m concern the hierarchy of tea bags is as such:
Powder in paper < pieces in paper < anything silk < silk pyramids < large pyramids < whole tea in large pyramids.
There’s a tea shop / Chinese restaurant in Berkeley California that’s trying to grow high-quality tea in the California mountains. He hasn’t gotten it to the point that he’s really happy with it yet, but he’s aiming for something that can compete with better Chinese products.
I started drinking herbal tea in college. Partly it was the 70s hippie thing*, but if you’re staying up late studying, in a cold wet climate, you need to be drinking something hot and good-tasting, and if you drink the stuff with caffeine you’ll be too wired to sleep by the time you finally do get to bed.
Usually when I want real tea, it’s Chinese pu-erh from Yunnan, or sometimes Assam, or rarely a Japanese green tea. Except for the Assam, putting milk in it would be a crime. (I also drink my coffee black about 90% of the time.)
*(Yes, I wore the Celestial Seasonings “Weeds to meet your needs” t-shirt for 4/20 day :- )
So let’s put PG Tips into a cultural perspective. The equivalent coffee product to PG Tips in Britain is Nescafe Original. This is soluble coffee granules. It’s only really palatable with milk and two sugars. Both these things are a kind of minimum standard that it’s acceptable to offer guests without being judged as miserly or overly pretentious.
Stocking fancy instants that actually taste of coffee or only having fancy teabags will get you judged harshly. I usually only have Twinings Assam in bags, which can be passed off as badly made cheap tea if I only steep it for a minute and guests don’t know where it came from. This is not much more expensive than PG tips, but is quite hard to distinguish from loose assam in a pot.
I’m 33 and straddling the cultural changes here, friends and relatives my age or older consider putting the coffee machine on or making a pot of tea to be some kind of token ceremonious act traditionally performed on Sundays. I’ve had two cycles of the game night host discovering a drip-filter coffee machine and realising beans are not expensive (ACW reencatment is to blame for this) and being briefly mocked by players for being pretentious until it became obvious that the supply of coffee was no longer a disruption. Despite half the group being tea drinkers it’s still PG/Tetleys/Yorkshire Tea bags of cardboard that are handed out.
I think across 30 tea-drinking games, one has expressed a preference for my Assam, 10 have complained that I gave them something weird and different.
I think rubbish teabags came in during times of austerity and rationing, particularly WWII, along with an influx of visiting american GIs demanding coffee and distributing ration-pack instant coffee as something exotic. My parents both grew up on the tail-end of rationing, and until I had a chance to explore adulthood, I drank what I’d been shown.
Particularly telling is that my mother, formerly a teacher and then a church minister from the early 90s and has recently retired, discovered the world of real coffee and loose tea at about the turn of the millennium but had to keep bad instant coffee and cardboardy teabags as most church-related visitors would get uncomfortable if the teapot or cafetiere appeared.
Of course even when I show up to her small (former mining) village cottage in the depths of British winter doing my drowned-motorcyclist impression, I don’t get a choice but to indulge the cafetiere ceremony complete with quaint thermal jacket tied too the outside of the coffee pot in lieu of the iconic british tea-cosy.
