At The Tea Spot, we focus much of our time and efforts on innovation. Our mission is to foster health and wellness by making loose-leaf tea an everyday luxury. To make this a reality, we strive to make the preparation of loose-leaf tea easy. To accomplish this, we have designed a line of Steepware® products that are intended to make brewing loose-leaf tea both simple and enjoyable. As you might imagine, we have spent a good deal of time pondering how people enjoy tea and other beverages.
In developing our products, I work on new processes and “widgets” for brewing loose-leaf tea. As a part of this discipline, I research innovations that have been developed and published in the tea industry. This is the first of three posts that will highlight some of the greatest hits as well as my favorite finds in the world of tea technology. This first post covers the two most significant tea-related inventions in the U.S. over the last century – the tea bag and iced tea.
Thomas Sullivan is acknowledged as having invented the tea bag in New York City in the early 20th Century. As it turns out, his clientele played a big role in defining the product. Sullivan reportedly packaged small samples of his teas in silk bags for shipment to many shops in the U.S. and abroad. He chose silk bags over metal tins to save on cost. But no one could have predicted what happened next. Instead of removing the tea leaves from these sample bags, people found it easier to infuse the tea in the bag. Thus one of the most significant tea-related developments of the 20th Century came about.
The vast majority of today’s tea bags are made of paper. The heat-sealed paper tea bag was patented by William Hermanson, one of the founders of the Technical Papers Corporation of Boston. He sold the patent to the Salada Tea Company in 1930. Today Lipton Tea claims to manufacture about 50 billion tea bags annually.
Iced tea, which was first served about the time the first tea bags were created by Sullivan, was also invented inadvertently. It was first introduced at the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis. Richard Blechynden, a tea producer and plantation owner from India, had set up a booth to promote his black teas. The sweltering summer heat and humidity prompted him to serve the tea over ice, just to get people to try it. It became an instant hit at the fair. In the 100 years since then, consumption of iced tea in the U.S. has grown to over 40 billion cups per year.
About 80% of the tea consumed in the U.S. is iced, and more than 80% of the tea sold in retail locations in this country is in bags. We can trace most American tea experiences today back to these two major tea-related developments from the first decade of the 20th Century. It’s interesting to note that they were both inadvertent and customer driven.
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