For those who know me, and much to r’s delight, this is a post about tea.
Recently, Lipton has announced a new pyramidal shaped tea bag — which, to those out there, is far from an original idea, but is a new leaf for the Lipton Tea brands (NY Times article; username: supernicety, password: password).
Curiously, the pyramid nylon bags took Lipton two years to develop. Other tea distributors I’m familiar with have had pyramid bags for ..oh, about two years or so. Lipton is finally catching up and finally acknowledging the quality differences.
But companies began compromising quality, and before long the little paper pouches were filled with the lowest grades of tea. Consumers did not object. In fact, they liked the fact that the minute particles in tea bags required but a few seconds in hot water to produce deeply colored, strong flavored liquid.
But Lipton is cautiously wandering down this “tea can be good” path.
Mr. Cheetham [Lipton’s Royal Estates tea master, who selects and blends teas] acknowledged that Lipton’s flavored varieties were “entry level” teas. And they are a far cry from Harney & Sons’s Dragon Pearl Jasmine or Mighty Leaf’s Darjeeling Choice Estate, which are sold in bags that cost 30 cents to $2 each and available at tea shops, fancy food shops and online. Lipton’s Pyramid teas, at $3.49 for 20 tea bags, cost less than 20 cents a cup. Ordinary tea bags average 2 to 8 cents a cup.
“Lipton’s Pyramid will bring premium tea to the masses,” Mr. Cheetham said.
I would like to point out that Lipton is really really late. With so many other tea companies out there producing affordable tea, their more expensive “premium” tea will be just another selection in the alphabetical ranks on a grocery shelf.
There are some choice quotes from the article that I want to chortle about:
Mr. Simrany [the president of the Tea Association of the USA] said, “the new tea bags are changing consumer attitudes toward tea; the snobbism is gone.”
Ha!
Pyramid shapes be damned. I will still insist that the best tea is brewed OUT of the bag.
And even though the better tea bags will produce an excellent cup of tea, some of the finer points of tea making have been lost, like the different water temperatures and steeping times required, depending on whether the tea is black, oolong or green. An exception is the tea made by Le Palais des Thés: a suggested temperature and brewing time is printed on the foil packets that contain the muslin tea bags. But how many tea drinkers pay attention to those arcane details anyway?
Hahaha!
I have a theory: Ms. Fabricant, our dear author, does not like tea. Nor has she drank good tea brewed to a specific range of temperatures. I forgive her for this because she wrote the article that finally let me write about tea here at the Supernicety and because her first name is Florence, a city in Italy, which is a country I want to return to. So see? She is the blameless, somewhat ignorant-but-she-wrote-it-anyway author of an article that makes Lipton look silly.
I don’t think some of her word choices reveal her impatience and stupidity regarding her subject at all.
And yes, for the record, I an not bitchy enough to not give Lipton the benefit of the doubt — I will purchase one of their froufy teas and growl only limitedly at the non-biogradeable nylon bags.