29th January, 2007: How we make tea
With this recent trend in cold temperatures our tea bag machines here at Bigelow have been running to make sure we have enough tea bags available for everyone. Our teas taste great cold or hot but the majority of people tend to drink it to warm themselves up so we are the busiest during the winter time.
We produce our tea bags on machines that run from 100 tea bags per minute all the way up to 300 tea bags per minute. Even at that speed we have to run overtime sometimes to keep up with the demands of our customers, but that’s ok. Our machines get lonely if we do not run them enough. So if you are feeling cold or just want to relax with a hot cup of tea we are here making sure there will be plenty of tea on the shelf when you need it.
Posted by Dean at 6:37 am | Comments (8)
19th January, 2007: A Tea Drinker Asks and We Answer
I recently left a reply on a personal blog where they posed a great question about tea quality. Since many of our readers might not have seen it, I thought I’d repeat on this blog what I said. Argentius, in Seattle Washington, asked in a recent post
I am drinking some Red Rose black tea right now. It’s bad. It’s not AS bad as Lipton’s, but it’s not good at all. Kinda bitter, flavorless, and flat. What do they do to make Twinnings or Bigelow a bit better? Why is Stash “premium organic” tea especially good? Does it relate to the quality of leaves in the first place, the age of the product, the roasting method, or what?
Here’s what I said in the blog post’s comments:
You are so right, bad tea can really be bad!! First off, if you do not start off with hand picked tea, you will get machine cut product filled with stems. Tea loaded with stems does not have a clean taste like hand picked. It goes without saying, the tea made from pure tea buds is much smoother! Second, your ingredients have to be top notch…for example-our Earl Grey is a beautiful hand picked black tea with the real oil of bergamot. The leading competitor uses a tea leaf size called “tea dust”. Tea dust is the smallest size tea leaf possible; however, the problem with tea dust is that although it provides quick color into the cup, it has no real tea flavor. It also happens to be an inexpensive tea to purchase. We do not allow any “tea dust” in our mixes. The leading competitor of our Earl Grey also only uses a bergamot flavoring -not the real oil which is very expensive (not to mention much better tasting). So I cannot speak for why other teas are “good” to you except to say they are most likely using good ingredients and a rich tea!
The same thing does apply to the age of tea; you have to remember that tea is a leaf and will get stale and pick up other flavors, if exposed to them. The reason we take the time to overwrap all our tea bags is because we want to protect our tea leaves from air, light, other flavors, etc. That overwrap protects our tea up to two years from the day it is packed.
So there really is a difference in teas…thanx for noticing!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Cindi Bigelow, Co-President, Bigelow Tea
Posted by Cindi at 9:30 am | Comment (1)
