One thing that puts many people off from making tea with leaves rather than bags is that the whole process can get a little messy. Tea sieves can stain your tablecloth with drips, rinsing out the pot afterwards leaves your sink looking like a compost pile, and, unless you’re careful, you’ll end up with floating leaves or sediment in your cups anyway.

Perhaps more importantly, making just one cup at a time takes just as much effort as brewing an entire pot.

Yoassi Tea is Without Any Sediment

This tea strainer, with its elegant, functional design, neatly solves all of these problems. The wings at the top hook over the opening of either a teapot or mug; after the brew has been properly steeped, you can use the heat-conserving lid as a base to keep spills to a minimum.

The holes in the sides are very fine and will keep all kinds of grit from getting into your tea, so you can use even very fine or crumbly leaves. There are a lot of these holes, though, making the body impressively porous. This allows good circulation, so all the boiling water can come into contact with whatever you’re steeping. The 2-inch wide, 3-inch tall receptacle also helps water swirl around even a large quantity of leaves, extracting the maximum amount of flavor.

The dishwasher-safe stainless steel should last you a lifetime, though all that should be needed to keep it clean is rinsing it out under the tap after every use – unlike some tea infusers, the simple shape has no nooks or crannies in which small leaf fragments can get trapped.

If you order the two-pack, you can give one away and keep the other one for yourself. However, you could also use one of them to brew coffee without using a machine. Just remember to keep your tea and coffee infusers separate: some flavor does somehow remain stuck to the metal, and combining the two is not at all pleasant.