Word of the Week – Tea Bag - Roseanna M. White

As November is upon us and with it come cooler temperatures for many of us, it seems like a great time to explore another reader request and look into the history of the tea bag.

People have been brewing tea for thousands of years, of course, but it wasn’t until the early 1900s that the invention of the tea bag made single-serving brewing so easy. So who gets credit for that invention? There’s actually a bit of debate.

In 1901, Roberta C. Lawson and Mary Molaren of Milwaukee filed a patent for what we know as a tea bag, though they called it a “tea leaf holder.” Their design used fabric with a loose mesh and called for the bag to be big enough for water to flow around the leaves but small enough to hold the leaves together. They focused on how much less waste of tea leaves their holder would necessitate.

But the first practical application came in 1908, when tea manufacturer Thomas Sullivan sent out some samples in silk pouches. He merely intended the pouch to be an easy way to send these small samples…but his customers plopped them right into their tea cups and poured water over them! They proved popular enough that Sullivan began receiving requests for the tea-filled bags, and he soon learned that silk didn’t allow water through well enough and changed to a gauze with a bigger mesh. Customers loved the ease of the tea bag in brewing a single cup and also the cleanup.

By the 1920s, the world’s biggest tea companies had jumped onto the tea bag bandwagon and were selling their teas in individual servings. The bags haven’t changed significantly since then, though they did move gradually from a pouch style to the bag we see most often today.

Are you a tea enthusiast? Do you prefer tea bags or loose leaf? I drink a lot of tea that I buy loose-leaf…but I also buy tea bags that you can fill up with this tea yourself, called T-sacs*. Very handy, and you can get two brews from each of these bags of loose leaf tea!