Dealing with Tea Dust

Normal tea bags are usually filled with low quality tea dust.

There’s not much you can do to make a tea bag taste better. It results in a bitter and astringent brew.

And in general, a very bitter and astringent tea is associated with low quality or at least incorrect preparation.

However, for loose leaf green tea, tea dust can still be enjoyable.

If you buy konacha, which consists of small pieces of tea leaves, you’ll find that it tastes way better than your average green tea from a tea bag.

The reason is that even though konacha is an inexpensive Japanese tea, it still has a better quality than the tea bag.

The same can be said about matcha. Although it is a powder, it has a great taste because it is made from high quality tea leaves.

Besides that, good green tea is fresh while green tea in a tea bag isn’t.

Tea dust inside your package of loose leaf tea

There will almost always be tea dust at the bottom of your loose leaf tea package, because the leaves break down slightly when handled.

Since it often results in a bitter cup of tea, some tea drinkers just throw the tea dust away.

But this tea dust is not so low in quality, so we can try to prepare it just like konacha.

In other words, we can lower the infusion time.

For example, try 30 seconds or less for 120 ml (4 oz) of water.

You can also experiment with a lower temperature.

The idea is to reduce the bitterness. While tastes vary, an excessively bitter tea isn’t easy to drink.

Another way to make it taste better is to mix it with tea leaves that aren’t broken.

What do you do with your tea dust?