Teabags ≠ Whole Leaf Teas!
Teabag tea does not equal to leaf tea.
I have read many, many tea blogs, books and propaganda trying to persuade the reader that teabag tea and whole leaf tea are the same. In one case, a tea trader who said he had been in the trade for almost thirty years answered the question whether he has any scientific proof to support a similar claim he made. His answer was to ask the inquirer to grind 2 grams of whole leaves and to break a teabag to obtain also 2 grams of tea dust to infuse them side by side to see that they look the same!
Mind you that was an open forum for tea enthusiasts and people of the trade! Hopefully most people have some basic common sense to ignore such nonsense.
The quality of the absolute majority of teabags out there are poor to say the least (though a teabag is still better than bottled drinks or instant mixes (1). Let’s see why.
Deterioration of Quality
Firstly, if the tiny broken particles of tealeaves in that teabag were ever produced from a whole leaf tea with respectable quality, the substances that we want from tea — the taste and aroma materials, such as the essential oils and amino acids; the health contributing constituents, such as the catechins and theanine — would still be much less than those in the original whole leaf. That is because by the time the broken particles in the teabag goes into your tea mug, they have already spent at least months, if not years, through the warehouses and logistics chain, separated from the all the environmental elements only by a thin cellophane and a flimsy paper box, neither of which are effective protective packaging materials. Most of the quality substances in tea deteriorate upon extended contact with the elements, that’s one reason there is much less quality in that teabag.
The difference in EGCG — a most potent catechin — content in finer teas and lower quality teabags. All natural green teas infused at tea to water ratio of 1g to 100 ml water. USDA figures, actual figures are more extreme, since finer quality whole leaf teas are almost all the time missing from studies. Notice the lower than average of the “mean”, reflecting a majority of lesser quality available to the scientists conducting these studies (1)(2)
A Matter of Profits
Secondly, a quality whole leaf tea can demand a much better price, so no producer will grind up what he can sell for more money to make what will make less for him. The content of the teabag inevitably will have to come from some lower cost production. It will deteriorate dramatically anyway, so why the waste? On that note, although the cost of such particles of tealeaves is low, the consumer may not be paying that low per gram of tea, because the process of teabag packing itself, the extra machines, packing materials and bulkiness cost in logistics have to be count in for the pricing. Gram for gram, a teabag pack is sometimes more expensive than whole leaf teas!
In tea trading, teabags are mostly filled with quality at the “dusting” or “fanning” grades. They are normally a couple of dollars a kilogram at best when traded. Most are far less. Contrast that with commercial whole leaf grades that are at least tens of dollars. Artisan teas such as fine traditional oolongs are yet another level up.
However, gram for gram, you don’t see such difference in the consumer market. A lot of the times the price for a gram of tea in the teabag is close to that of leaf tea. Why?
Profit margin. Generally merchants markup more in the teabag than in the leaf tea. More about it later.
Whose Call is it?
A trader friend in Europe who has also been promoting quality traditional tea told me last year that he had also joined the teabag wagon. “If that’s what the market wants, we may as well be making some business from it.” He’s right, the trend for quality is a question of chicken and egg.
I am not against teabag as an infusing tool or a package form. I am only against bad quality. In the use of the tea mug chapter, I have even recommend breaking up whole leaf tea to put into an infuser bag for steeping at water temperature lower than needed. However, breaking the leaves immediately before infusion is quite different from having them grounded a year ahead and sitting in the supermarket warehouse for another before coming into my mug.
Whole leaf tea for taste and health
Back to the quality issue. Many, many scientific studies have measured the amount of health contents in various types of tealeaves. Those executed by scientists of Far East Asian origins are more likely to study better quality tea and those in the West sometimes are a bit casual about the tea samples they obtained, but that’s a broad wash generalization. Figures varied extremely greatly, reflecting a same situation of tea quality in the retail market.
To play fair, we have used data from the USDA Database for the Flavonoid Content of Selected Foods (1), as we have in the Health Benefits of Tea chapter. This time, we look at the disparity between various qualities. We have taken EGCG as an illustrative example. It is, after all, a most potent ingredient in tea. As you can see in the diagram above, the content in a “mean” quality green tea can be over 33 times that of a teabag version (2). If we don’t look at the mean and look at the maximum records of EGCG content, the better ones are over 100 times that of the poorest one. If you use that as value-for-money bench mark, calculate for yourself how over-charging these dingy little bags actually are!
Maximize the Value You Get for the Dollar
The data sheet is freely downloadable, read it yourself if you can to see all the datas. Tea drinks and instant mixes are even worse, as is evident in the database. They are so much more dramatically poorer than even teabags that we think it is a shame just to show them. And if you ask why on earth those teabags and drinks are still selling so much better than loose leaf teas, well that’s market behaviour and the invincibility of the big corporations. They have a much bigger budget or deep penetrating marketing campaigns to manipulate perceptions and consumer behaviours.
It is simple economics after all. They have much higher margin in their products so they can put more money in it to promote it to sell even more. The whole thing becomes viral and more companies, some smaller, are joining in to do the same.
They wouldn’t want you to know: milligram to milligram of taste and health substances, finer teas are many times better value than that pop in the vending machine or that thin paper packet in your office pantry!
For me, I wouldn’t use my money to subsidise some giant company to pay for the vacations and luxury sedans for the remuneration of their marketing executives, while at the same time giving up my access to better taste and better health. I think I am a smart shopper. Do you too?
