How to make a cup of tea for an academic

As a British researcher working in France, I have struggled with something of an existential crisis regarding my choice of hot beverage at work. I have always been a tea drinker, following the sage advice of the UK Ministry of Munitions (1916) that “an opportunity for tea is regarded as beneficial both to health and output”.

Yet the social pressure to drink coffee here is almost as overpowering as the taste of the (awful French) coffee itself. My office has no communal milk, but an endless supply of olive oil and balsamic vinegar. Nonetheless, I patriotically persist.

Of course, I always start out with loose-leaf Assam, filtered water, milk and white sugar, as per the Royal Society of Chemistry guidelines on brewing the perfect cup of tea. And I NEVER reboil the water, perish the thought.

Sometimes I go all in and crack out the teapot. Unfortunately, when it comes to pouring I always get that pesky dribble down the underside of the spout (the “teapot effect”). It drives me mad (“first world problems”).

This effect has been helpfully modelled in a Physics of Fluids paper, while a further paper, which happens to be written by four French researchers, identified a number of factors that affect dribbling. These include: “curvature of teapot lip; speed of flow; and ‘wettability’ of teapot material”. The main culprit, the “hydro-capillary” effect, can easily be overcome by either thinning the spout or applying superhydrophobic materials to the lip. Easy, then.

Then comes the stirring. Or at least it would if I could ever find a teaspoon in the communal kitchen. Previously, “information on the displacement of teaspoons in institutional settings [was sadly] lacking in the medical and scientific literature”.

However, some Aussie researcher set out to answer the age old question “Where have all the bloody teaspoons gone?” with a longitudinal cohort study. They meticulously tracked 70 teaspoons for five months, observing a staggering loss of 80% and a teaspoon half-life of 81 days. The researchers were, however, stumped as to why this occurs, with “escape to a spoonoid planet and resistentialism” being suggested as possible explanations.

Then the fraught walk back to the desk, inevitably involving the loss of a third of the tea I just lovingly brewed. Indeed, “in our busy lives, almost all of us have to walk with a cup [and] often we spill the drink” (more first world problems).

As reported in a Physical Review E paper, researchers with evidently too much time on their hands conducted an experimental study on beverage spillage, controlling for various walking speeds and initial liquid levels in the cup. Now I know that I must control my movements so as to stay firmly within what they call the “critical spill radius”.

Obviously tea isn’t tea if you don’t dunk a biscuit in it, and academics have even overthought this simple pleasure. Washburn’s Equation describes how liquid moves through the biscuit, while a team of mechanical engineers used a gold-plated digestive to figure out how best to dunk. You need a full cup and to dip with slant to start with, but the real trick is to flip the biscuit post-dunk so that the slightly less wet side supports the weaker side as you move from cup to mouth.

The best thing I’ve seen this week

Academics tweeting faux campus society announcements (#UniSocieties). My favourites include: The Statistics Society (“Stats Soc has taken delivery of large consignment of tea. There will be a student T-distribution next week.”); The Short Attention Span Society (“Will meet on... oops, I stepped in... are they serving burritos for... I forgot my...”); and The Societies Society (“promoting meta-analysis and academic overthinking”). I took this opportunity to highlight that that LSE Rugby Club will not meet at all this year, having been disbanded for their misogyny and homophobia.

Overheard on Twitter

Don’t forget your tea:

Finally, this tweet made me smile, all the way from the northern reaches of these fine British isles.

So there you have it, the perfect cuppa from brew to biscuit. Just don’t forget to do the washing up. Oh, and please tweet me @academiaobscura if you have any spare superhydrophobic materials lying around.

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