If you are drinking tea for the caffeine content it's best to steep the bag for as long as possible, iirc it takes about 15 minutes for ~95% of the caffeine to extract. One teabag usually has 60-80mg of caffeine so equivalent to one cup of instant coffee.
If you’re really hard up for caffeine, purchase pure caffeine powder. $20 is enough to satiate an average person for a year, or to overdose daily for a month.
I drank a lot of sweet tea and mountain dew in high school and occasionally coffee, then switched to energy drinks in college. Until I did the math on the energy drinks and bought a Keurig, which is convenient enough that I stopped my daily energy drink habit and saved a ton of money. Are there cheaper ways to get caffeine? Yes. Will my sleep disordered ass use any of them? No.
Pardon me? Only uncultured american teenagers who don´t know anything about good taste believe such utter nonsense! What "tea" are you drinking anyway? Must be the dust they collect after sweeping the floor of the packing plant and then put in teabags to sell it to people who know nothing about tea. Do yourself a favour, go and buy some nice loose leaf Darjeeling, FTGFOP or even better SFTGFOP, prepare it properly and apprechiate something truly good, maybe it´s not too late and your taste can still be saved ...
Coffee is very cheap if you actually just make it. Maybe not cheaper than 4¢ tea bags sure, but cheap.
Edit: if anyone is curious about making coffee simply at home, buy a French press (fancy doesn't matter, get a $15 one on Amazon) and some coffee grounds (taste is just an experiment of what brand you like. Eventually you'll want to grind your own beans but don't worry about it for now. If you can, get medium grind grounds, as that's supposed to be good for French presses) follow a guide online for making it. You'll need a way to measure hot water like a kettle, but that's the same for tea so hey.
Mean while,
me: chasing the perfect origin flavor from beans only from specific farms around the world, roasting only to city or city+, takeing notes with each grind mil size and brew time and brew method, constantly chasing such small and slight subtle changes, completely convinced that I'm ever getting closer to the perfect cup.
It's about 70$ per 2 lbs of un roasted beans.
And I don't want to figure out how invested into equipment.
More recent
me: yerba mate.... welp time to invest in a nice kalabash and buy every blend under the sun ! And start the chase for the perfect brew !!
I was so obsessed with Dutch Bros Paris tea that I went and ordered a bag so I’d stop spending $5/day going there. It’s still the best tea that I’ve ever drank, IMO. Add some agave and it’s my own little Dutch bros at home.
Funny. I stopped drink energy drinks few years ago. I started going night shifts, and I used energy drinks and coffee. Then, I once said to myself I don't like the taste of energy drinks. I stopped drink energy drinks just in one day. Never have then since. Five years and still counting.
On the other side, I started slightly drink more coffee.
I remember when you could get a kilo of pure caffeine powder on Amazon which worked out to like $0.0001 per 50mg dose, and then one idiot had to go ruin it by overdosing.
I love the giant, inexpensive tins of ceylon tea at my local international market. If you can afford it, buy a bottle of rose water to add to the tea. Perfection. And of course, don't throw away the leaves - steep them again - the second steeping is even better than the first one.