Brewing coffee and steeping tea seem to be the same process: soluble molecules of coffee/tea are dissolved into hot water and the solid insoluble parts are filtered out by my understanding. So why can’t coffee come in tea bags so that it would be easier to make a singular cup? Or inversely, why is hot water not percolated over tea like making a pot of coffee?
In: Chemistry
Tea doesn’t have all the horrible tasting compounds that coffee does…tea doesn’t become undrinkable if you leave the bag in for a long time (within limits), coffee does.
Tea does have steeping times but that’s to get most of the flavour out…once you’ve done that, nothing else much happens.
Coffee has a bunch of tasty compounds that come out relatively quickly and a bunch of horrible bitter ones that come out after more time/heat. The art of brewing coffee is the right amount of heat and time to get all the stuff you want and none that you don’t. If you just let the coffee sit in the water like we do with tea, it gets gross much faster and in a different way than tea. Cold brew works because it doesn’t have enough heat to extract the nasty ones.
Short version: it’s a hell of lot easier to overbrew coffee than to overbrew tea, and the results are worse.
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