These days, with the introduction of tea bags the extent of the use of tea strainers has reduced quite significantly. This is not to say that you can no longer get hold of a suitable tea strainer. You can. Only that as our lifestyles speed up we allow less and less time to enjoy some of the aspects of our life which used to be really important but have now largely been left by the wayside. An example of an activity that is becoming increasingly unusual is the formal tea making ceremony and the use of various tea making equipment, including the tea strainer.
The reason, as you will almost certainly know, that a tea strainer is required when making tea is that if you are going about the process of making tea that does not include a teabag then you will inevitably need a proper teapot, some real tea and of course something to gather the various soaked tea leaves into as you pour the infused tea drink into the cup. No body likes to drink a cup of tea only to find little bits and pieces floating around in their drink. Hence the need for tea strainers to undertake this particular task.
The different varieties of tea strainers include all sorts of delightful contraptions. They tend to separate however into two broad categories; tea strainers that prevent the tea leaves from spreading out and generally circulating unfettered within the pot; or those that remain external to the tea pot where the tea brews and are designed to collect the tea leaves as they are poured out of the tea pot and into the drinking cup.
The first type of tea strainer tends to be stainless steel, although they can also be glass or ceramic and are rather like detached infusers. The second type can be made of many different materials. Stainless steel is perhaps the most popular, but you can also get ones made from other materials, perhaps the most exotic being bamboo tea strainers.
In conclusion, although tea strainers are less relevant to everyday life than they use to be in the past, for those people who still love to enjoy a cup of tea complete with a more formal or studied way of making it will still want to use them. You will still be able to purchase tea strainers for some time to come, albeit that they may well soon only be obtainable from specialist tea vendors.
