Tea strainers

[mtbc]

This morning I was again washing out the tea leaves that had caught in the metal mesh of the infuser and I got to wondering, do we not have any materials that are very permeable to water but on only a minuscule scale so that particles visible to the naked eye can't even get stuck in them? Water molecules are after all very much smaller than fragments of dried tea leaf, they ought still be able to flow well through micropores I'd have thought. It thus seems as if there ought to be room for improvement where infusers are concerned.

(Actually, in this case I was making rooibos which appears to take the form of very thin twigs, so even worse for getting caught, and perhaps I'm just too attentive in cleaning the strainer afterward.)

Comments

[gerald_duck]

There's the old saying, "is water wet?". It's rhetorical, but actually water isn't wet. Not as wet as many other things, anyway.

This presents a problem: although the molecules are small, surface tension is high.

It feels like you might be looking for Gore-Tex except (a) it's only permeable to water vapour, not to liquid water and (b) the ePTFE is weak unless bonded to something else, and the something else would have to withstand boiling water.

Maybe you want filter paper. Though it's important to note you do want things bigger than water molecules to get through, otherwise you're left without any flavour, which kinda misses the point.

What you really want is filter paper which is permeable to all the flavour elements of tea but not any grot. I believe such purpose-made filters are widely available, with the added convenience that a each filter pre-encapsulates a measured amount of tea. :-p

[mtbc]

With surface tension I wondered if it be lower if contacting a surface that is somehow electrostatically more water-like or somesuch.

Very good point about flavour; whether that is mostly soluble molecules or also rather larger structures I really don't know. I don't even know what brewing is but I get the impression that it's more than just dissolving and otherwise getting carried off. I should look that up, to see why absolutely boiling water is so crucial.

Good point about tea bags too. (-: Orwell is much against them and more generally people do write about the importance of the leaves having a large volume in which to circulate. To what extent their ideas have been subjected to double-blind trials is another matter, of course, but still perhaps one could take the contents of the tea bag and somehow affix the remaining bag on the spout!