A Nice Cuppa

‘Ich lass mich gar zu gern (Teekanne Javalied)’ by Carl Alfredy, published by Musikverlag Metropol (Berlin, sd). Illustration signed ‘molge’.

On our way back from Berlin we did not enjoy our rather bland breakfast. But the tea was lovely and its brand name Teekanne rang a musical bell.

Back home we searched our sheet music collection and sure enough we found the above stunning cover. It was probably designed by Heinrich Molge for the German tea company Teekanne, a firm founded in 1926 that still exists. Molge (1888 – ?) was a Dresden based artist of whom we know little but that he was half of the graphic artists couple Molge-Koch.  The Asian red and white teapot however is still used as today’s logo of the Teekanne company.

Advertising for Teekanne’s textile incentives : small silk gadgets offered by Teekanne with their product.

To thank customers for their loyalty, Teekanne offered small silks. These promotional gifts, popular during the early 1900s,  could be stitched on tablecloths or cushions to embellish them. In the tobacco industry these little textile gadgets were more common, as seen in our earlier posts about Dutch Cigarettes.

Advertising poster for Teekanne, by Jupp Wiertz
Advertising poster for Teekanne, signed with PL monogram.

Teekanne engaged excellent illustrators for their advertising campaigns. Also, their tea blends were packaged in lovingly designed tin boxes.

Teekanne played an important role in the invention of the teabag, that ‘ordinary’ item that we are so used to. The history of the teabag starts in 1901 with two American ladies who obtained a patent for a tea-leaf holder. We do not know if they ever commercialised their invention. The first modern tea bags in the Western World were hand-sewn fabric bags. The story goes that the New Yorker Thomas Sullivan sent samples of his tea leaves in small silk bags to potential buyers as a sales gimmick. His customers wrongly supposed that these were meant to be popped into a teapot and loved the idea.  So this Sullivan, and others, started selling tea in single-serve bags. However, customers started to complain because the glue used to seal the bags left a bad taste to their nice cup of tea.

During the First World War, Teekanne adapted the idea and started mass producing round cotton-gauze bags sewn by hand, and tied close with a piece of string. These tea bags —also filled with sugar to offer energy— were called Teebomben (tea bombs).  The Teebomben were distributed to the German soldiers on the front line. Alas, soon they got the reputation among servicemen of only colouring hot water to a brown concoction.

Advertisement for Tee-Bomben by R. Seelig & Hille (the trademark owner of Teekanne)

After the war the German inventor and self-made engineer Adolf Rambold started to work for Teekanne. And in 1929 he invented the world’s first tea-bag-packing machine. Twenty years later he invented the double-chamber tea bag: the tea is filled in two chambers allowing an optimum flow of water around the tea which results in a fuller tea flavour. In the same year he proposed a new tea-bag-packing machine which produced these double-chamber tea bags. His machine sold all over the world and  revolutionised the tea market. I never analysed my teabags before but indeed the double chamber is still used for today’s tea bags.

Double-chamber teabag.
The two following ‘tea songs’ from our collection were very successful in their days. Apart from a hit, Tea for Two even became a standard.
‘La tasse de thé’ by Joseph Szulc, Gaston Dumestre & Roger Ferréol, published by Salabert (Paris, 1920) and illustrated by Atelier Salabert.
‘Tea for two‘ by Vincent Youmans & Irving Caesar, published by Salabert (Paris, 1924) and illustrated by Roger de Valerio.

Now, let’s start to bake a sugar cake and have a tea for two…

Possibly you would prefer Bourville’s version of the famous song in the film La Grande Vadrouille. Certainly a memorable hot scene!

For the aficionados of Teekanne, hereunder is the German publicity printed on the back of their sheet music. To be read with a nice cuppa, of course!