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.)