Tea bag question

I would keep it in the bag. Usually the contents of tea bags are quite fine and will go through most strainers.

I don’t see why not, but I also don’t understand why you would want to have really fine tea floating around in your cup (assuming you are not using a strainer).

If you want to open the bag anyway, then you might as well use loose leaf tea instead.

I guess it’s sort of like drinking matcha. It doesn’t matter if you drink all of the contents inside the bag.

I am going to agree with Mr. Caicedo; if you are going to go through the effort of opening the teabag then you might as well be using a high quality loose leaf tea. All effort being equal, you will find a much better taste quality as well as health benefits from the loose leaf tea.

The other point I would make is that, by doing this, you would very likely wind up drinking some of the tea leaves directly. While this may appeal to you if you enjoy matcha tea and the like, for some people this will be unpalatable. I would suggest not using the teabags in the manner you describe.

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If you really want to drink tea from a teabag I would suggest buying from a source that actually puts high quality tea in it such as Lupica. Their tea bags are the same quality as their tea. The stuff you buy in the supermarket is almost low quality product made of tea dust and lower quality tea.

It depends of what kind of teas you have and if the teas in the tea bags are whole leaves or not!

Maybe it’s a bit over the top for me to offer much opinion about tea options and grades since I’m just one more person that drinks tea but I will anyway. There’s no reason why the tea in a tea bag would need to be awful or the lowest possible grade but in general it really does work out like that. Using a fine tea dust powder for tea bags allows for use of very little tea that brews quickly, getting the most flavor from a little tea, but the grade often used is low, and that form alone can help bring out the astringency in any tea. Mid-grade tea can be much better, and it need not be inexpensive. When people recommend brewing “high quality loose tea” they’re not necessarily talking about tea that costs a lot. The better versions do cost $20 per 50 grams and up (just a ball-park), or perhaps nearly a dollar a cup to brew (roughly—all of that is relative, many factors relate), but decent loose tea can be quite inexpensive, a fraction of that. Really it’s as much about finding a type you prefer first rather than a quality or cost level. People new to tea might think that they prefer green or black tea because these are easiest to encounter as tea bags, and there are lots of nice variations of those types as loose teas, but oolong really covers a broad range, some of that moderately priced for reasonable levels of tea, and there are other types.