"tea infusers" news and stories

Hey, it's always National Tea Month is my house.

This is a good opportunity to update everyone on my tea infuser search. I've switched from store bought tea bags to loose tea, and my first purchase was this Tovolo tea infuser. It works great (and looks funky, a nice bonus). I also bought the Melitta tea filters, which are something I didn't even know existed until recently. My local supermarkets didn't have them, but I found them at Borders. They're like big tea bags, but you can put as much loose tea in as you want, and they make a fine cup of tea (I wanted to say "fine cup of Joe" there, but that's coffee - does tea have a slang term that's a name too?).

Tell me in the comments how you make your tea (tea bag, infuser, etc) and what brands of tea you always come back to. For me, it's been Twinings.

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.