French press
A coffee device that works surprisingly well for tea, and fails in one specific way that most people never notice. Leaf goes in, water goes over, you plunge and pour. The problem is what happens to the leaf after you plunge.
- Capacity
- 350 ml to 1 l
- Material
- borosilicate glass or stainless steel, steel mesh
- Origin
- a coffee device, adopted for tea
- Best for
- robust black tea and herbals, poured out in one go
What it is
A glass or steel cylinder with a mesh plunger. Sizes run from one cup to a litre. The mesh is coarse by tea standards, sized for coffee grounds, so fines and broken leaf will get through.
What it does to your tea
It gives the leaf a lot of room, which is genuinely good: full immersion in a wide cylinder is close to the ideal of loose leaf in a pot, and much better than a cramped infuser. What it does badly is stop. The plunger separates leaf from liquid only while the liquid is above it; anything left in the cylinder keeps extracting against the compressed leaf bed, and the second cup you pour is measurably stronger and harsher than the first.
What it suits
Robust black tea, herbal infusions and anything you will pour out in one go. It is also good for large-leaf teas that need room, provided you drink it immediately.
How to use one
Plunge gently. A hard press crushes the leaf and releases the bitter fraction, and it also damages leaf you might want to resteep. Then pour the whole thing out into a second vessel rather than leaving it standing. That single habit fixes the device's only real flaw.
How to choose one
A finer mesh than the coffee default if you can find one, and a beaker you can replace, since that is the part that breaks. Steel keeps heat better than glass; glass lets you watch.
Care and cleaning
Dismantle the plunger occasionally and wash the discs separately. Tea fines pack into the mesh layers and are hard to see.
What people get wrong
Leaving it standing after plunging. The plunger is not an off switch, it is a strainer that happens to be at the bottom.
What it is made of
