When it comes to people who love to drink tea, the one in your mind must be a Chinese with yellow skin and black hair. After all, tea drinking has a history of thousands of years in China. In the West, the rationalists fall in love with tea. In order to drink a cup of tea, they want to know how to store, carry and drink tea at any time. They spent 139 years on research and innovation.
In the early days of European tea drinking, Chinese tea was still being drunk. Over time, I felt that the amount of tea consumed by this tea was too large and it was troublesome to clean the tea set. So I began to wonder whether it could save tea and drink it at any time, so Americans had bold innovations. -"Teabag".
There is also a theory that in the 1880s and 90s, American Thomas Fitzgerald invented a filter for tea and coffee, which was the earliest prototype of tea bag.
Another is that in the United States in 1901, two Wisconsin ladies, Roberta C Lawson and Mary McLaren, applied for a patent for the "tea rack" they designed.
Another legend is that in 1908, American tea merchant Thomas Sullivan, in order to expand tea sales, put a small amount of tea in small cloth bags and gave it to customers for a taste. The customer misunderstood the use of tea bags, instead of taking out the tea leaves, they put the tea bags directly into the water, so there were tea bags.
In the beginning, American tea bags were called "tea ball". Drinking tea in a small cloth bag not only saves tea leaves, but also facilitates cleaning. This quickly became popular. From the output, we can see how popular the tea balls are: in 1920, the output of tea balls was 12 million, and by 1930, the output rapidly increased to 235 million.
During the First World War, the teabags produced by German tea merchants were used as equipment for soldiers to join the army. Soldiers on the front line called it Tee-Bombe (tea bomb). To the British, tea bags exist as rations. By 2007, tea bags accounted for 96% of the British tea market. So far, there are tea bags all over the country!
I figured out how to fill the tea leaves, what about the packaging materials for the tea leaves? The material of the tea bag affects the taste of the tea bag. The early Tee-Bombe was made of cotton yarn, and the taste was quite primitive.
The Tee-Bombe produced in Germany in the early days of World War I was made of hand-sewn cotton gauze. The tea bag contained tea and sugar, and the opening of the bag was tied up with a rope. Cotton gauze seriously affected the taste of tea soup. Nowadays, the most common attempt is to use filter paper to make tea bags. After all, coffee does the same. A good filter paper tea bag is made of plant fiber, the paper is thin and has many small holes, and the tea soup has better permeability. The obvious disadvantage is that the smell of filter paper is very obvious. The filter paper tea bag is opaque, and the brewing state of the tea inside can not be seen, and it is easy to break after long time. With the development of industry, newly emerged non-woven fabrics are also used for the production of tea bags, but non-woven fabrics may release harmful substances during high-temperature brewing.
Non-woven fabric is more durable than filter paper and has better water permeability. But the shape of the tea is not visible.
Later, the technology improved, and new material gauze appeared, that is, the gauze was woven from nylon, PET, PVC and other materials, but these materials may have harmful substances in the brewing process.
The gauze tea bag is more stiff and you can see the tea leaves clearly without soaking in water. Until recent years, the emergence of corn fiber (PLA) material changed all this. A tea bag made of this kind of fiber woven into a gauze net not only solves the problem of the visual permeability of the tea bag, but also has a healthy and degradable material, making it a tea bag for easy drinking.
