Tea bag and loose leaf tea, which one do you like best?

Gypsies can’t tell fortunes with tea bags!

Definitely loose leaf. I’ve made it a little mission of mine to convert people from bags to loose leaf tea. Its not a lot of convincing either. Step 1 is to find reasonably priced, good quality tea to dispel the myth that loose leaf tea is naturally expensive. Next is to prove its not hard to prepare loose leaf tea/you don’t need a ton of equipment to do so.

And once you brew a cup of loose leaf tea for someone who hasn’t previously tried it, the flavors do the talking.

If you can find good tea in good quality bags, I don’t think it makes as much difference as the conventional wisdom seems to think. In my opinion, most of the bad reputation teabags get is because many bags are made with low-quality tea, and most people’s first experience with good tea is with loose tea.

Even if it was a tea bag with a good quality tea inside, I still prefer loose leaf.
Loose leaf tea looks better, I like to look at the spent leaves as well.

Also, I want to control how much tea leaves go into my cup, with tea bags I’m limited by the portion inside them.

I definitely prefer loose leaf. My biggest problem with tea bags is I can taste a papery taste left in the water that I find really unpleasant. I’ve tried cutting them open and just brewing the tea from inside to get around that, but since the tea is in dusted form, it tends to clog up the very fine mesh infuser in my gravity-well steeper. I really do want to give bagged tea it’s “fair shot,” but unless I can find some way to steep it that gets around the bags, for now I’m more or less avoiding it.

When making a cup of tea using loose tea, the loose tea can circulate through the boiling water and swell. This swelling means the maximum flavor and color can be extracted from the loose tea. A good quality tea bag though will be capacious and thus the loose tea will have a certain amount of movement, so if you want to use bags always buy the best quality you can for a better cup of tea.

However, some advantages to tea bags. The main advantage of a tea bag vs loose tea is convenience. Tea bags create no mess or soggy, left over loose tea leaves, so it’s quick and easy to clean the tea pot. :D

But I also prefer loose tea.