LibreTea Mug Test 2 — Black Tea

Time for round 2 of our testing of the new, larger glass and poly travel mug from LibreTea. In the first round, hubby and I tested a favorite white tea, Snow Dragon. For this test, we chose a favorite black tea, Scottish Breakfast also from The English Tea Store.

As mentioned in the previous article, LibreTea has a great instructional video on their Website that I strongly recommend you view before using this mug. Then, you can decide if you want to follow their directions or go your own path. (If you choose the latter, please don’t blame LibreTea if something goes wrong.)

We chose to bravely go our own path when steeping this black tea, mainly because we strongly prefer to steep this and other loose leaf teas directly in the pot, mug, etc., without bags, sachets, or infusers of any kind. The dry tea leaves were put directly in the body of the mug, not in the filter/strainer/infuser.

This black tea doesn’t put on quite as much of a show as Snow Dragon did. The tea leaf pieces strangely huddled near the top of the water, with only a few pieces falling. (This is the opposite of their behavior in a teapot, where they laze around on the bottom.) This tea, like many black teas, also steeps fast, so there wasn’t a big color change.

The Test Results:
The tea steeped up fine, as it did in the first test and has in other such mugs, but again that dilemma faces me. What’s next? Since I like to put milk and sweetener in this particular black tea, how do I do that without having all those leaves in it, which need to be strained out anyway so the tea doesn’t oversteep?

Once again, the answer is to strain the tea into something else. In this case it was a regular mug large enough to hold the full amount of liquid in the LibreTea steeping mug. As you can see, this tea liquid has a beautiful ruby color (some tea connoisseurs call black teas “red teas” based on the liquid, not the dry leaf, color). The tea leaves stayed in the mug, ready for a second infusion, which we did.

What do you do if you’re in the office or other workplace? One option is to follow our example above. Of course, if you tend to drink your tea a bit at a time instead of downing the cupful fairly quickly, the tea could get cold. Another option (and one which I suggested in the first test) is to buy two, one to steep in and one to drink from (tip: keep the cap on between sips to keep the tea hot). Your tea will stay hot and the pleasantly warm exterior of this mug will be a great hand-warmer both in Winter and Summer (excess air-conditioning). As I previously stated, the volume of this mug is sufficient to last during the most grueling commute.

Disclaimer: This mug was provided to me by LibreTea for this review. My assessment of it is strictly objective, however. If you’ve read my reviews of other products, you know this is true.