When making a pot of tea, I tend to add teabags and sugar at the same time; once the tea has brewed, I give it a stir, remove the teabags, add milk, and then with the aid of a knitted tea-cosy I get several hot mugs of tea in succession and can keep working without the need to return to the kitchen.

However, when I do return to the kitchen a recurring question bounces around my head: how much sugar is absorbed by the teabag before it is removed from the pot? i.e. exactly how much is the taste affected and how much energy is lost?

I recall from GCSE science that one way to test this would be to take sample teabags that have been percolating themselves in teapots with differing amounts of sugar, then once dried, burn them in a controlled environment and measure the energy given off.

Perhaps different teas have different absorption qualities too. Perhaps different bag shapes and materials also affect absorption. Who knows…

Anyhow, it strikes me that:

1. there are probably better ways to do it than I can think of, so what are they? and
2. someone’s possibly already done the experiments, so are any results published?

So I’ll let the web do it’s thing, no doubt the answer will one day arrive with a knowledgeable reader (hello you), and in the mean time, I can stop wondering because I know the answer is on it’s way.