Dunking your tea bag (if you do such a thing!): Does it matter?

To dunk or not to dunk - that's not really the question. Whether the dunking does anything at all is more the heart of the inquiry and, I've discovered recently, the subject of a number of articles ranging from hard science to enhanced fluff.  Perhaps even more surprising, all come to the same conclusion.

Last week, my husband forwarded me an article titled  "Dunking tea bags: Nervous habit or infusing technique?" from myrecipes.com.  The writer was curious as to whether the act of lifting your tea bag up and down in a cup of hot water was an effective infusing technique or just a tea drinker's tic.

While some of the writer's facts were a little off (e.g. black tea is not created from fermentation, it's the product of oxidation) and opinions a bit inflammatory (an assertion that, with regards to tea quality in tea bags, "tea snobs are sort of full of it"), her findings on the act of dunking are supported by some rather weighty research.

Does bouncing your tea bag actually do anything substantial? asks Matt Harbowy, a research developer with a masters in chemistry from Cornell,  in a 2012 Forbes article, complete with equations and controlled experiments. He, too, lashes out on the tea snob's disregard for the tea bag, but only supported by anecdotal evidence (his aunt keeps her tea bags stored for years and complains of the taste, but, Harbowy acknowledges, outdated shelf life, doesn't bode well for most tea).

Harbowy continues on the same topic in a 2014 article for the Independent, "Let me ask you this. . . ",
where he touts the same results, but now under the title of "tea chemist".  So, clearly, this guy is the tea dunking guru.




So, for a bit of my own fluff-plus-science original research, I prepared two cups of  black tea in tea bags today. I dunked one tea bag rapidly for three minutes, observed its color and took a sip. I repeated the same process for my next cup of tea, but this time, no dunking.  I, too, came to the same conclusion as the myrecipes.com writer and tea chemist,  Harbowy.

If you rushed to the end of this blog story to find out what the results are (from three sources cited here!), I will hold back no longer:  dunking does nothing to enhance or detract from the taste of your tea.  It passes time if we're anxious, but other than that, the steep is the same whether you bob your tea bag several times, or let it rest comfortably for it's three to five minutes in your tea cup.

In the end, do what makes you most happy - if rapid dunking gives you purpose, go for it. If you want to just hang, let the tea bag chillax in your cup while you start reading your tea magazine.

Or, with my tea snob comrades, we'll probably bypass the tea bag altogether, and go right for the loose leaf.  

Barb Gulley, tea snob, fluff and original research reporter.