History of Tea Bags

If you’re a tea person you would know how important tea bags are and how they’ve made our lives so much easier. Whether we are at work or hanging out or at home, us tea lovers just can’t live without tea. Tea bags make the task of brewing tea a lot easier. Instead of boiling the tea in a pot all we do is just dip the tea bag in a cup of hot water(add a little milk too if we like it that way) and we’re good to go. But of course it wasn’t always like this. Tea bags were just invented over a 100 years ago and that too by accident.

The story of how tea bags were invented goes like this:

In 1904, Thomas Sullivan a tea merchant from New York sent some samples to his clients. The samples Thomas sent were wrapped in pouches of silk. His clients instead of opening them up just dipped the pouches directly into hot water and brewed the tea. And this is how tea bags were born.

Seeing the popularity of his tea bags and customer feedback, Sullivan developed sachets made out of gauze, the first purpose-made tea bags. Commercial production of tea bags started in the 1920s, and soon the bags became popular all over the United States.

Up until the early 1940s tea bags resembled small round sacks. The modern day rectangular tea bags that we use today were not invented until 1944.

Some Facts About Tea Bags:

Each Tea Bag contains about 3g of tea.

In each teabag of Litpon’s Black Tea, the tea contains about 25mg of Potassium.

Teabags were adopted by the British much later than the Americans. Tetley was the first company to introduce tea bags in UK.

Tetley started commercial production of teabags in Britain in 1953, about 30 years later than the Americans did.

Tea bags are made up of either filter-paper,nylon or food grade PVC(plastic).

Some artists use on teabag papers to create different shapes of art. This practice has become known as teabag folding or teabag origami.

Because Teabags are not airtight, the tea loses flavor over time. So it’s best to use them as quickly as possible once the packing containing the teabags is opened.