With the new year, a lot of us are trying to live a more healthier life. Perhaps that involves drinking less bad things (like soda) and more good things (like tea). I have to admit, I am a recovering Coca-cola addict. I haven’t had a soda since February 26, 2014 (that’s over 1000 days)! I drink mostly unsweetened iced tea and water now. I started drinking loose-leaf iced tea in the fall of 2015 and have figured out how to make a gallon at a time to my liking.
So when my awesome parents bought me some tea in bags for Christmas, I had to figure out how to make it. Loose-leaf tea is a little different than tea bags, in that the leaves in tea bags are generally smaller, and you can’t exactly make it with my tea ball. I know that I need to measure out 1/3 cup of tea in order to make a large pot of tea, but if I’m using tea bags, how do I know how many bags equal 1/3 cup? Prior to finding loose-leaf tea, I could never figure out how to make it just right.
Enter large Finum Tea Bags. I can’t tell you whether they are better or worse than other tea bags, because I haven’t tried any others, but I can tell you what my experience is. These seemed to work out pretty well.
These tea filters can hold a lot of tea. As you can see, when compared to a normal size tea bag, these are ginormous. When you’re making a gallon of tea at a time (actually I measured the other day and it’s closer to 5 liters) then you really need to have your tea filters hold a lot of tea.
So to try out these tea filters, I got out my tea, along with some of the tea that I got for Christmas. I like to blend different flavors, and since I still have some Christmas tea and Candy Cane tea from Adagio.com, I decided to mix them with some Earl Gray tea. The first step, of course, was to measure out the tea.
After I measured out the tea, I used a funnel to pour the tea into the tea filters. I didn’t want to spill any. One of the chunks from the Candy Cane tea got stuck in the funnel, but I dislodged it and the rest poured into the bag quite nicely.
The entire 1/3 cup of tea fit into one tea bag; however, because I know that tea expands when you put it in water, and the bag was pretty full, I decided to use two tea bags, and there was plenty of room in both bags.
Because I had never used tea filters before, I didn’t really know if they would stay closed. For the purposes of this experiment, I decided to tie one bag shut (using the string from one of the tea bags that I was using, and fold the other bag over a couple of times. Since I was going to put both bags into my tea ball anyway, it wouldn’t really matter if the folded bag opened while the tea was brewing (other than the fact that some of the smaller tea leaves would escape through the mesh of my tea ball.
Then I put both bags into my tea ball, and I put the tea ball into my pot of (almost) boiling water. This is how I will probably be making it at home most of the time.
After I finished making my tea, I checked the tea bags to see if either one of them had opened up. Fortunately, both of them were closed. I think when I make this tea in the future, I will probably just fold the bag over a couple of times.
There are a lot of good things about these tea filters. You can fit a lot of tea in the bags. Not only are these good for tea that you get from tea bags, but there are a lot of other fine teas (like Roobios) that would probably work better if you make it in these filters than in a mesh ball. If you don’t like the little bits of tea that end up in the bottom of your pot (or cup) when you make regular loose-leaf tea, then these would be helpful as well.
I can find one drawback for these tea filters. There is no string at the top of the bag. That isn’t a problem for me, since I just put everything into my mesh filter anyway, but if you were making a big pot of tea, you might have to use a slotted spoon to fish the bag out. Also, since I made my tea in my tea ball, I can’t tell how the bags will react if you just put the bag in normally.
For the way I make tea, I would definitely get these again. Since there are 100 filters in this package, and I won’t need it for most of the tea that I make, even if I use two bags at a time, this package will last me a very long time.
Finum tea filters come in an extra large size (the size I bought was large) as well as some smaller sizes.