I want to get more into tea but I always find infusers to be a pain in the ass to clean and just overall more of a...

Depends on your priorities, but to me loose leaf tea is a meme. I've had everything from cheapass tea to expensive 100/lb stuff from Taiwan and ultimately I prefer the simplicity of a good teabag (if you choose the brand well).

Part of this is that I like to drink tea a lot, constantly throughout the day, and I don't want to constantly have to fiddle with an infuser and tea leaves while at work.

I know I'm making a sacrifice when it comes to taste; I just don't care enough.

Loose leaf is totally a meme. Only chicks and hipster millennials go to stores like David's Tea.

Just buy some fucking bushell's, tetley's, some green tea and maybe some camomile. also buy one of these >brands
wtf do you mean "brands"? it's just a fucking tea pot.

>disparages "chicks and hipsters"
>drinks camomile

>Buy french press
>Put tea in french press
>Put water in french press
>Wait
>Wow it's tea
>Rinse it out
If you want a pain in the ass, coffee is far harder to clean out of a press.
(You)

sup op, finding the right brewing method for me (a lazy piece of shit) was what kept me from doing loose leaf for the longest time

teavana sucks but i wandered in one day when they were doing some big buy one get one sale and i let them push one of these on me

youtube.com/watch?v=ZFokIpdmlAU

all you gotta do is rinse it out, and the mesh is fine enough that shit doesn't get caught in it or get into your cup.

i dunno if loose leaf is a meme or not but i like at least having the option. this is the only thing i've had so far that i've liked.

>upside-down french press made of plastic

Disgusting.

deeper, motherfucker! cover it with lid and call a gaiwan for gongfu.

not going to argue at all, like i said, teavana sucks and i know that this thing is the epitome of that garbage. still, i'm not interested in really refining my tea tastes. i just like hot not-coffee drinks during the winter.

You can make hot non-coffee beverages without leeching cancer out of plastic

Um...I like these ones.

Seemed this is a hot tea thread, I will ask:

What's the authentic way to enjoy British tea? Raw or add sugar and milk?

i appreciate your concern for my safety but you're cordially invited to suck my cock

>bagged Twinings

I find they always taste like soap.

Try a tin of their loose tea, much better.

Fine, get cancer and die.
You deserve it for buying Teavana in the first place.

Does loose leaf French Vanilla exist?

No, but Ethiopian Cock does.
Order online

Yeah I see where you're coming from. I'll give it a shot.

drink powdered tea!

loose leaf is not a meme, just stop being lazy or use a fricken french press

Just drink tea, you uppity faggots

>tfw i just buy salada green tea and put it in my cup of hot water every morning

It's not that hard to make tea mang

>Is loose leaf a meme?
Calling things memes is a meme.

Fine.

Is loose leaf tea really better, or is this just often repeated and regurgitated nonsense from people that just want to fit in and don't actually have an opinion of their own?

Happy now?

it's generally better and if you're a hardcore tea nerd the best shit is loose leaf only

it's also less convenient i.e. if you want to drink tea at work you're probably not going to fuck around with an infuser

I have one of these from Davids tea. It's alright, I think it's a tad hard to keep clean though. But I've used it for a while and it always makes delicious tea.

anyway you make tea is fine, it's just a drink

Yes it's better both in the variety you can find (find me some dan cong oolong as a teabag I dare you) as well as the quality of the tea.

Good quality loose leaf tends to be made up of near whole leaf, which allows multiple infusions and a changing flavor from steep to steep as the leaves unfurl and release the oil on them.

Tea bags tend to be made of fannings (also called tea dust) which infuses must faster and harsher meaning it is much more likely to be bitter.

Personally I use a 100ml yixing pot for oolongs, and I have about 6 different gaiwans between 100-150ml each - no infuser needed. But you could easily get a mug with a built in strainer, or a larger tea pot with a strainer near the spout that you can take out to rinse off if that's your preference.

Loose leaf also tends to be cheaper if you brew it gong fu style (less water more leaf). For example I can get some silver needle from yunnan sourcing for 7.50 per 50g, which is about 10 servings. From that I get 5-10 steeps at 100ml each which is a half to a full liter of tea for about 15 cents.

You also get more information with loose leaf if you're buying from a good shop such as picking/processing season, area grown, elevation, varietal etc which are all factors in the taste.

If you just want to stick to bagged tea, that's fine, but you could be getting a better product if you know where to shop and what to look out for just like people drinking pre-ground dunkin donuts coffee could be getting better quality from a local roaster and probably for cheaper as well. But the fact of the matter is that a lot of people don't really care about the difference over the convenience given by bagged tea/starbucks coffee.

Also assuming you're buying from quality places the tea you get will be much fresher compared to bagged tea. Bagged tea is probably months old at BEST, when you can browse a quality tea shop (online or brick and mortar) and can find out when it was picked and processed and pick one that's the freshest. Further there are some varieties of tea that simply don't exist in bagged form (as far as I'm aware) like pu erh which is a type of aged tea coming in both ripe and raw form. There are also different processing methods which aren't as clear or even present in bagged tea such as rolled oolongs, different types of roasted oolongs, compressing the tea into a cake or ball, etc
I've yet to find any bagged tea that comes close to Ruby 18 oolong, or Dan Cong or Wu Yi oolongs, and even the black teas that are available tend to pale in comparison to their whole leaf cousins.
Even for the daily drinker it's not hard to get into tea if you wanted to have better quality, but if you like what you're doing now why would you change it?

I see everyone trashing on David's Teas in here, but they make a coffee/tea hybrid I really like. Any better places make something similar?

You know that you don't get cancer from that, right?

Can someone drop some recs for
>spicy chai
>vanilla rooibos

Teabags only please. Also I'm in Canada so if I can get this shit from a store that would be dope.

>being this assmad

w
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loose leaf vs teabag is like bottled wine vs tetrapack, there might be good ones but its very unlikely.
Nobody that grows a good tea would sell it to a company for very little that shreds it til its almost dust and puts it in packages that loose all flavours on a supermarketshelf.
Most good teas and tearegions are not even available as a teabag, its just not something thats done. if you are really interested in tea and have no really good teashop around you (which you probably wont have) go to yunnansourcing and get a puer, an aged oolong and some other stuff that sounds interesting.
for brewing i dont really see the problem, its just the leaves and water, i dont get what the deal is, not like it makes a mess to pour through a strainer,use a teapot,frenchpress or anything else

I buy one of these packs every two or three months and drink a 1.25 liter pot of tea every day. I use a strainer and let it steep about 3 minutes.
Or I make iced tea with lemon and sugar, 5 minutes steeping time. Sometimes I use East Frisian tea if I'm in the mood for a change.

I have only had about 12 different wines and literally every one of them was very different.

>This Response

See here's the thing. You go to Safeway and buy 4 or 5 different boxes of "tea" and they could be all pretty similar. Especially if you just go for the ones that say "tea" and not (as one user said) lapsang souchang or genmai cha or whatever.

It's the same with wine, a large % of the wine made today fits a certain taste profile and it will taste all pretty similar even between bottles that are supposedly different varietals (blending rules and the tendency for people to go for whatever varietal is in fashion causes wine makers to blend together, say, "pinot noir" that tastes exactly the same as the "merlot" that was in fashion 5-10 years ago)

No, you're just not considering the environments that wine is actually made in. You've just created some scenario in your head and are acting as if what occurred in your imagination is occurring across the world all over the wine industry.

The environments? What does that even mean? I am obviously not talking about "the entire wine industry" any more than I am talking about "the entire tea industry", but obviously you've got an axe to grind with some straw man that you imagine yourself to be defending wine against, so by all means, get it off your chest.

you don't know how wrong you are

Winos think that different regions' soil impacts wine flavor even if you do everything else exactly the same.

>Winos think that different regions' soil impacts wine flavor
They're not wrong, if it really upsets you to think about you should try to find some of the muscadets from Domaine de l'Ecu, they have a series that has wine made from the exact same grapes grown in different soils but vinified in the exact same way. The differences are not as strong as say, malo vs non malo, or oaked vs unoaked, but they are there.

That said, the effects of soil and other "natural" factors tend to get overstated and confused with the effects of vinification for a variety of reasons

I recommend buying it pre-made. You can't do better than the professional brewers

Complete bullshit. They're fucking grapes. The effect soil has on taste is insignificant. Home grown grapes in Cali taste identical to home grown grapes in Italy. Stop pushing memes

Climate will also affect the production of sugars and other compounds in the grapes, which leads to different flavours depending on region and what the weather was throughout the growing season.

>facts upset me
ok, it's all a scam meant to humiliate you