I love coffee, but I am also besotted by tea. I know tea has great health benefits: A doctor friend of mine only drinks tea and never coffee and when you ask him why he refuses to drink coffee he looks you surgically dead in the eye with great precision and says, “I drink tea.”
The great folks at Lipton — and I admire that company because, for the last 100 years, they brought tea time to the American masses — have revolutionized the tea business with their new synthetic “pyramid” tea pouches where “only the top two leaves and a bud are blended to delivery an exceptionally pure tea taste and aroma”:
You can see the tea leaves in the bag are much bigger and of higher quality than the ordinary paper bags of yesterday.
The only trouble is figuring out how to wring out the last bit of tea
goodness from the bag without burning your thumbs!
The old tea bags were plump and fat after brewing and you would cozy
the bag in the dip of a spoon and wind the tea bag’s thread around the
spoon and cuddled bag to get that last big of juiciness out of the
leaves.
A pyramid, I learned, does not want to cozy and it refuses to be
cuddled!
A pyramid tea bag is big, triangular and it really doesn’t enjoy being
squeezed at all!
But as a proper tea addict, squeeze I must, and so I pinch a pyramid
side or two and all those extra bits of 140mg. of “naturally protective
flavonoids” — free-radicals neutralizing flavonoid antioxidants —
come rushing out of my Black Pearl Lipton Pyramid tea, plucked from the
dangerous heights of Sri Lanka, and all is right with the world in
spite of my blushing thumbs.