Like Tea Dust in the Wind

This is my tea station at work... more specifically it's the right side of this table in my office where I put all my tea stuff. When I can maintain the rhythm and routine, I will drink tea every morning via a convenient method of using my tea infuser/tumbler and this Zojirushi water heater. It still kinda impresses me how I can do it so easily within an office, which seems to add to the zen-like experience of tea drinking over all... maybe.

Anyway, the mesh screen on my tea infuser is starting to develop larger holes in it from regular use. In addition to that, it's not a superfine screen to begin with. It would normally be a problem for most people, except I happen to almost exclusively drink sencha. Specifically, most of the sencha I use is fairly brittle and either ends up getting broken into smaller pieces, or just turned out that way via it's processing to begin with. There's also usually a good amount of what I like to call "shake" (also referred to as fannings or dust).

Anyone got a bowl?

I usually buy good quality tea in the first place, so it's not like this shake is bullshit grade stuff you would find in a Lipton-esque tea bag (although it closely resembles what you would find if you emptied one), but if I don't separate it, then it gets through the screen of my infuser. Drinking tea fragments in your brewed tea isn't a bad thing either and it's something that happens 90% of the time anyway, especially if brewing via a traditional method (kyusu, etc).

So several months ago I started to try and remove as much as the shake as I can before hand, which is actually pretty easy. I just put the tea into the lid of the infuser and use it like a flour sifter, moving it back and forth until no more small particles make their way through. A lot of the time its a bit depressing too, seeing just how much shake there is in some of the more expensive teas I buy and knowing that it's "going to waste". Seriously, I'll buy a 3oz can of shincha for like $50 and probably end up sifting out 30-40% of it out onto the table. Sometimes I don't know if it's my fault for acquiring a new found sense of OCD or if the tea producers are just not being as careful during the processing of the leaves as they should be.