Here's a lifehack I came up with recently. As I've talked about before, I buy tea from Adagio Teas and I used to by the tea bags that they sold. The tea bags are really good quality, but they're also expensive (compared to a box of cheap tea) and really big. Plus the whole bag would soak up water and cause the water to spill over the mug.

I noticed that at work, they have a stack of Lipton tea. Now, I don't know about you, but I just can't drink Lipton tea anymore, not after getting into the good stuff. So I thought, can I dump the sawdust out of the Lipton bags and put my tea in them?

1. First, take the little staple out of the top. Be sure to keep the string.
2. Unfold the top of the tea bag and open it up. If it's any newer brand it will probably be what most companies call a "Flow-Through Bag". That means it's open at both ends, so be careful not to dump the tea all over you.
3. Stretch it out to it's full length over a trash can and dump out the tea. Don't worry about getting it all out as there will be small specks left in the corners.
4. Wonder how you ever drank anything that looks this close to the little charcoal filters you use in your fish tank.
5. Get a spoon and your good tea. Fold one end of the bag over so the tea doesn't flow out the other side. Put the spoon in one end of the tea bag and turn it so the bag pops open.
6. Spoon in a teaspoon of tea. I'd do this over the tea container because you will spill some. Don't fill it too much. I find that you don't seem to need as much tea as you'd think using this method.
7. Fold the bag in half so that both open ends are together. Fold them into a peak.
8. Wrap the string around the peak twice. Be sure to make it snug but not stranglingly tight.
9. Staple over the string vertically. You should be able to give it a little tug when you're done and not have the string slip through the staple. I've found a good Swingline works best.

When I first did this, I was worried that the bag would make the tea taste bad, because I sometimes think that it tastes like Lipton is brewed in a brown paper bag. I was happy to find out that it's the Lipton tea that tastes like a paper bag and the tea bag imparted no taste at all.

I've found that I can make a couple of these at a time and then I have one on hand in the mornings when I'm too tired to try and mess with it. Since cheap bagged tea is so damn, well ... cheap, these bag actually end up costing a lot less (by a few pennies plus shipping and handling) then the bags made for loose leaf tea. Try it out and let me know what you think.