A tea strainer is a simple tool with a simple purpose. You could use a fork or coffee filter to do the job, but why would you? Tea is a healthy moment to relax, so you should have a healthy, well designed tea strainer to help you make the perfect cup of tea.
Here is our top pick followed by some other options.
We’ll get right into my top tea strainer, but first, what are we looking for?
- No plastic – Food-grade stainless steel or similar
- Reasonable price – Save your money for nice tea!
- No moving parts – Not mandatory, but let’s keep it simple!
- Name brand – A name means accountability and trust
- Dishwasher safe
Best Tea Strainer: OXO Brew
My favorite tea strainer is the OXO Brew. It’s a bit expensive — about $12 — but it’s sturdy, built to exacting standards, made of food-grade stainless steel, and it has a great design. It’s a pleasure to use and I like it so much I have replaced all my tea strainers with this one.
The Brew only has two materials: silicone on parts you touch and stainless steel. It has no moving parts and no plastic. The silicone doesn’t touch your tea and it only is used to touch the top of your cup and the sides of the cover. As you might have guess based on these locations, it’s used for heat protection, which is a very nice perk.
The tea strainers hole are etched, not made our of wire mesh, so they are made to an exacting standard. This means the strainer has a cool, industrial look.There are no mesh pieces to break (the holes are made out of a single sheet of metal) and no wires to come loose. Best of all, there is no plastic to leech microplastics into your tea.
Tea Strainers On Amazon
There are hundreds, possibly thousands of tea filters and strainers on Amazon, but almost all of them come from brands I’ve never heard of and have no reason to trust. Given Amazon’s free-for-all-selling I find myself less and less willing to use the random product and incredible deals I find in the Amazon Marketplace when it comes to food preparation.
As for the big names sold on Amazon, most of the products are problematic for me. For example the Bodum Double Wall tea glass with included strainer looks great, but they use plastic mesh as the strainer. They use plastic filters on their tea pots as well. Yes, it’s BPA-free, but that seems the minimum a company should be doing, which not what I’m looking for.
If you need to order from Amazon for convenience purposes these two strainers look good: Rishi Tea Simple Brewer and Dodoro Infuser Tube. The Rishi is a glass beaker with a metal strainer — it looks like a French press coffee maker. I know and often enjoy Rishi tea, which seems like a good sign to me. The tea infuser is from a brand I’ve never heard of before, but it’s a piece of borosilicate glass, which is the same stuff Pyrex is made from. That seems safe enough to me. Judge for yourself!
Ichendorf Piuma Small Teapot
This humble German tea pot is a winner. I used this at a family member’s house and was impressed with its style and simplicity. It’s wonderfully made and has a fun, stout appearance which I’m quite happy with. This is a borosilicate pot that is not dishwasher safe (technically it might be, but it’s too delicate for me to try). I just wish it came with a cork stopper for the spout. This sells for about $30 plus shipping.
Glas Jena
This is another German glass manufacturer who is an expert in borosilicate work. The great thing about Glas Jena (called Trendglas Jena in the US) is that they also use borosilicate filters in their tea pots. What a brilliant idea! This company has reasonable prices ($35ish for a teapot) and nice designs. The craftsmanship is excellent.
The downside? You guessed it: these teapots are a bit hard to find in the US. Sometimes you might find something on Amazon, but otherwise you’ll need to look at specialty online retailers which means you’ll get hit with shipping.