You may have noticed that up until very recently, we only sold tea in its loose-leaf form.  There are a few reasons for this.  The first is that loose-leaf tea is often the preferred state for luxury teas.  When brewed in a tea pot or French press in this form, the leaves have the room to fully unfurl and release their flavor into the water.  You can imagine how a traditional tea bag that is flat with the leaves squashed in between would restrict the tea leaves from opening and therefore not allowing the leaves’ full flavor to blossom.  I suspect this is why many common tea bags have finely ground leaves in them (also called tea dust), not full tea leaves.  To provide that extra surface area in hopes the tea will be of greater flavor.  Unfortunately, tea dust is considered the worst grade of tea and you will never get the best flavor out of it.

I want to provide my customers a truly great cup of tea.  I want you to have every precious bit of flavor for your enjoyment.

The second reason is that no one had asked for bags, until one of my return customers recently asked if he could get bagged tea.  He had friends who loved our Bourbon Street Vanilla Rooibos but didn’t want the hassle of loose leaf.  So a month ago we began offering tea bags for our teas.

Tea bags have one thing going for them that loose leaf doesn’t: convenience.  And I fully understand that.  You’d be surprised how many days I’ve gone without a cup of tea because I had to fuss with a tea press – or worse, tea leaves getting stuck in a pot’s spigot that was too small.  (That is the worst, by the way.)

I have tried our new tea bags because convenience.  I’m very happy with the results; part of that is because we have used full tea leaves and not dust in our bags.  What we sell as loose-leaf goes directly into our large tea bags.  This, though still squashed between the layers of paper, will give you better flavor than tea dust. (And we sell it in a cool tin!)

Which is better?  For us it’s about providing a great cup of tea.  We aren’t here to judge how you get it.  So now we provide both.  Full bodied, luxury teas in both loose-leaf and in tea bags.

We hope you enjoy them both as much as we do.