Friday Favs: The Perfect Tea Maker

I thought it would be fun to share
some of my favorite things.
These are things that I use in my everyday life
that are AWESOME
that I think you should know about.
So, here we go!

First up, the Perfect Tea Maker by Teavana,
which is used nearly everyday at my house.
Tea’s the drink for me;
I drink coffee maybe once or twice a year at the most,
and only in overtired emergencies 🙂

Ok, I have to admit.
I was TOTALLY skeptical when I heard about the Perfect Tea Maker.
Anything with “perfect” in the name makes me not want to trust it.
I was at a Teavana store to get tea for a friend when I saw it,
so I asked the person working there.

“Is this thing REALLY perfect?”
He smiled because I’m sure he got that question all the time,
and pulled one out and filled it with water to show me.

Basically it uses gravity to get your tea to you.
You fill the tea maker with hot water and your loose leaf tea,
let it steep as long as you’re supposed to,
(I know there are some hard and fast rules about certain teas, but I never set a timer, I just sort of wing it)
and when you’re done, you set the tea maker on top of your cup.
That pushes up on the bottom of the tea maker,
resulting in tea coming out in a stream.
The tea maker fills up about two regular mugs of tea.

I LOVE this thing.
My friend Sean who is WAY into tea (sometimes we send loose leaf tea to each other in the mail. Yes, we ARE that dorky!) taught me well. He says loose leaf is the way to go, so the leaves can expand and you can get the most flavor. I’ve always wanted to get one of those cute diffusers…like the little manatee that sits on the edge of your cup…but honestly every time I get near one I think about Sean and I don’t buy it.

So I was happy to discover the last time I visited that he was a fan of the perfect tea maker too!

It even comes with a base to sit the tea maker on, which you don’t really need if it’s on a table, you you DO need if you have it on the carpet. There’s carpet in my room and I really like just sitting around on it. One night I made sleepy time tea, set the tea maker down on the carpet, and started reading my book. The next time I looked up all the tea had come out; the carpet was long enough to push against the tea maker and set the tea free! So, moral of the story is, use that base on carpet 🙂

I don’t ALWAYS brew loose leaf tea, but I use this even when I don’t to make a bigger batch of tea. My tea collection is getting bigger and I’m trying to go through what I have, so I’ve been using a lot of tea bags lately. This is also great for iced tea; I let the loose leaf tea hang out in a pitcher of water in the fridge for a day, and then just pour it into this as sort of a filter to get only the tea back at the end of the process.

Verdict: If you’re a tea drinker, this is 20 bucks well spent!