Are teabags poisoning me with microplastics?

Cloud forest Colombian tea + Ask a Tea Person advice on "silken" sachets.

A Colombian breakfast brew

The tea: La Cumbre Bitaco black tea, sold by Camellia Sinensis. $12.61 for 100g.

I first learned about the Colombian brand Bitaco at a tea industry trade show years ago. The tea was solid and the people representing it were sincere. I made a mental note and filed it away under “cool story, not my kind of tea,” and moved on. My vision for tea in 2018 was narrower than it is today. Traditional Chinese styles were “real tea,” and newer brews from emerging regions didn’t hold my interest. I’m happy to see that perspective change, in part from my efforts to find interesting stories for Leafhopper. So when I saw that Montreal’s Camellia Sinensis was carrying Bitaco tea, I knew it was time to get reacquainted with the garden.

How do you raise up an underdog tea region?

Bitaco is the specialty label of Agrícola Himalaya, a tea garden in Colombia’s Valle del Cuaca that climbs to nearly 6,000 feet in elevation. A valley traps ambient moisture, creating misty cloud forest conditions that are favorable for growing tea. The garden began the process for organic certification in 2013 and launched a line of orthodox teas in 2018. It’s a pleasure to watch tea makers improve their productions in real time, and I’m happy to report that this new batch is a delicious and affordable breakfast brew.

The source: While the Bitaco brand is new, tea cultivation in Colombia dates back to 1946, when Valle del Cuaca’s secretary of agriculture received some assamica and sinensis tea plants from Sri Lanka. The secretary asked a local coffee farmer named Joaquín Llano González to try growing the plants in the local soil, and they took. In the early 1950s, the Llano family began importing tea-making equipment and planted 100 acres of tea. They launched the brand Té Hindú, which became a popular line of commodity looseleaf teas, teabags, and herbal teas in and around Colombia. By the early 2010s, Bitaco tea specialist Claudio Gutiérrez tells me, competition from lower cost Asian imports encouraged Agrícola Himalaya to venture into specialty teas. The company now offers Té Hindú and Bitaco as sibling brands, and is still run by the Llano family.

To brew: I’ve found this batch tastes best with a light touch: 3 to 4 grams of tea in a 150 milliliter pot brewed with boiling water for 1 minute. You can steep it 3 or 4 times before the leaves give out. Camellia Sinensis’ tasting notes are spot on: there’s a dominant woodiness with accents of roasted grain, honey, and cacao shells. The tea’s light body is crisp and refreshing, and I get a nice finish of sugarcane juice. Brew the tea for 2 to 3 minutes if you plan to add milk. But I like the woody tea as-is, and this way, I get to enjoy an aroma of coffee in the empty cup.

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Ask a Tea Person: Should I worry about plastic teabags?

Welcome back to of Ask a Tea Person, Leafhopper’s tea advice column. Check out previous editions here, and submit your own questions by emailing max.falkowitz@gmail.com with “Ask a Tea Person” in the subject line.

Hi Max, I’m wondering if you have thoughts on plastic teabags. I try to avoid plastics where I can but they’re everywhere! It’s enough to drive me crazy. Are there any teabag brands you like that don’t use plastic? Will my morning tea habit fill me with microplastics? Thanks. — Irene B.

I have a short answer and a long answer for you, Irene. In short: yes, pretty much all teabags contain some amount of plastic. If you’re set on reducing your “microplastic load,” as researchers call it, drinking looseleaf will always be a better bet than teabags. I recommend ball-shaped oolong styles that unfurl into big, beefy leaves. You can steep these loose in a mug, and the leaves are so large they’ll sink to the bottom quickly. Not quite as convenient, but almost. You can also find paper teabag filters designed for loading up with your own looseleaf tea. These filters don’t have the plastic sealant found in most paper teabags.

The long answer is more complicated and less satisfying, because it’s all about looking at the messy big picture, but it also offers opportunity for hope.