One of my pet peeves, which I've ranted about before on this site, is tea bags that have staples in them.

Now, since I've switched to loose tea and infusers/filters, this isn't as much of an annoyance as it once was, but I still wonder about it. Last year I had a staple tear off of of a tea bag (one of my fears that became reality). That would have been nice to swallow. So I wonder why, in this day and age, do tea companies still use staples? Many companies, such as Tetley, don't use them, but I've noticed Red Rose, Twinings and Lipton (and many others) still have them. Why? We have the technology to create a staple-free tea bag, people!

We were once promised that we'd have our own jetpacks by now, but since that isn't going to happen anytime soon, can we at least have a tea bag without metal in it? Thank you.

I recently asked all of you fine readers for suggestions on buying either a tea infuser and/or a tea pot, since I wanted to switch from store bought tea bags to loose tea. Everyone gave me great ideas, and I'm going to try several of them and report them to you here.

First up: this funky-looking infuser from Tovolo. I got the red one. It works well. I mean, I have nothing to compare it to since it's the first one I've ever tried, but I did notice some tea (Twinings Earl Grey) did get into the cup. Is that to be expected? Do you tea drinkers out there just find that this is something you have to live with for good tea or are there infusers out there that don't have this problem? I do like this infuser. It comes with a cool stand to keep the infuser in. It made a great cup of tea.

Discussing the process of coffee decaffeination in an earlier post, I mentioned my "trick" for keeping the caffeine low in tea: steeping the leaves more than once (and yes, I did admit to using tea bags, a topic for a future post I'm sure). Bruce Dearborn Walker piped in and mentioned that many tea drinkers "wash" their leaves in one quick steeping of hot water before drinking to remove most of the caffeine.

With good tea, a 20- or 30-second steep won't remove much flavor and, in fact, many tea houses wash some types of leaves before serving as a matter of course (like the Tao of Tea in Portland). My big question is, how much caffeine does this really remove? And does it really remove the nutrients, as well? Have any great chemistry minds done the research? And if not, do we have any readers who'd like to dive in and test the caffeine in several varieties of post-wash tea?

[Photo of tea house in Portland Classical Chinese Garden, Sarah Gilbert]