Why did you make the jump to loose leaf tea?

Twinings Tea Darjeeling became very difficult to find and I turned to loose leaf Darjeeling to get what I wanted.

Tea bag must be easier, while brewing with loose-leaf tea is more interesting. I like the process of dry tea leave expands in my cup with boiled water.

Being Russian-American, I grew up in a house which was never without a good-size tin of sturdy, brisk Ceylon black tea or a flavored blend such as Czar Nikolai II or “Valentine” Tea (with rose petals). We’d always have tea bags around, too, usually some jasmine green and peppermint and the like. Now that I’m an adult (I guess?? Haha), I mostly keep good loose tea for use at home and decent-quality bags and sachets to brew at work, along with some medicinal tisanes that come in bags. Once you realize how much wildly better-tasting loose leaf tea is, you’ll never go back to doing bags exclusively! It is 100% worth washing the infuser by hand each time.

I already wrote a response to this thread somewhere else online since it’s been crossposted, but I’ll write a fresh one all over after reading some of the responses on here! :)

I’ve probably been drinking loose leaf tea since I was 2-3; both CTC and Chinese teas, starting with the occasional sip and then actual cups of tea at restaurants. My parents even let me drink coffee when I was 7. I used to drink multiple espressos in a row. Funnily enough I am now caffeine sensitive…

I didn’t really get into tea until I was 19 or 20 (‘99-’00) and visited a mall in Shenzhen (across from HK) with family and friends. One of my aunt’s friends spoke good Cantonese and we ended up at a tea store. I was enthralled by the gongfu brewing and ended up picking up a porcelain set and…jasmine green tea pearls. I was shown how to gongfu by the vendor. I took the set back to New York.

I remember how excited my landlady was when I pulled out that set a few years later and made her some tea gongfu style, but very clumsily, since I hadn’t brewed any tea in a while. The tea was still good, surprisingly, but I remember I overbrewed it and it got bitter. My landlady and her daughter were less enthusiastic about the tea then! lol

I got back into loose leaf tea much later; 2012 or so. I’d rented premises to work out of in an old neighborhood in HK and ended up sleeping there on occasion. I woke up one morning and got dim sum takeout from a place up the street. I asked for tea and didn’t get an answer since the staff were so amused by my Cantonese. I ended up going to McDonalds and getting me a Nestea instead, and wishing I had tea.

I started reading about tea, discovered TeaChat.com and then started buying tea in the neighborhood. I realized there was tea, especially pu erh, everywhere (not all of it good)! I’ve been drinking tea continuously since then, without a break of more than a week or two in all of that time (and the breaks are terrible)! :D

I think loose leaf tea taste better, but it is inconvenient to keep fresh. If you drink the tea frequently, you can also choose the loose leaf tea.

@LuckyMe—I am in full agreement. Loose leaf teas provide more infusions making them far more economical on the whole than tea bags. That does have to do with the tea purchased since some are more expensive than others, but I also discovered that a lot of bagged tea is commercial grade tea that has had additives put into the tea. A good example of this is decaffeinated tea—unless herbal, a tea has to undergo some rather unnatural stuff to make it decaf. And if I want to forgo caffeine entirely, I go with an herbal tea. In addition, what I enjoy about loose leaf is that it usually “shifts” with each infusion. I enjoy detecting the complexity of the tea. My senses may not be sharp enough, but bagged tea feels like it delivers a flat flavor profile. Also, since it’s not farthings, like the prized stuff some of the tea masters will keep from some of the teas they process after harvest, bagged tea tends to be broken leaves so that the taste is more astringent. Not to mention, it delivers all of its caffeine in one punch—the first steeping!

was looking for a great add on to my low carb low sugar keto diet. been drinking it ever since

I was given a small batch of a white tea blend from Teavana for Christmas several years ago. I was completely confused as I was an avid coffee drinker since I thought tea was gross (I had only had experience with store bought tea bags).

After I got an infuser, I realized it was pretty good. Later on, after I started buying from some chains, I realized how much I enjoyed loose leaf. I became the crazy tea lady at work who had a small tea shop in her office and I only used the coffee nook for hot water.

The obsession became real when I visited NYC and had a Chinese tea tasting in the East Village. That’s when I started really getting into it and started to look back at the teas I had before (essentially dust, though not all of them) and found a world of new flavors to discover. I’ve turned away from the major chains and am now trying teas from more local sources and farm to table sort of ventures.

My brother has been into loose leaf teas for a while, and I just never liked them when he made them for me. Recently, I decided to lay off soda, and he introduced me to gongfu brewing and it totally changed my perspective on tea! It helped that I was determined enough to kick the soda habit that I was willing to try a variety of teas until I found several I liked. My daily go-to now is cold brewed silver needle, and I’ve started introducing loose leaf tea to my friends with the small gongfu set I put together. On the downside, I seem to have picked up a bit of a teaware addiction…

I was trying to live a sedentary lifestyle while simultaneously not gaining weight, so naturally I started substituting tea for breakfast every morning. The problem is that I like food so I kept getting hungry and then drinking more and more tea throughout the morning, but tea is kind of not very substantial so this required A LOT of tea.

So there I was, drinking so much tea that I felt bad about all the packaging I was throwing away every day, and I said to myself, “Surely someone sells tea in, like, bulk, without all that packaging, right?” to which I replied “So you’ve heard of loose leaf tea, have you?” and then I said to Google, “buy loose leaf tea online” and it replied, “adagio.com” and Adagio said “Here, have $5 free” (or words to that effect) so then of course I said “Shut up and take my money . . .”