tags: Nice Things, Science
Teabags and Sugar
February 28th, 2007, by Rich.
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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:
- there are probably better ways to do it than I can think of, so what are they? and
- 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.
February 28th, 2007 at 8:04 pm
Ah, but if you did the research yourself you could find yourself up for an IgNoble!
February 28th, 2007 at 9:21 pm
Hey now, I’m going to have some time next month, maybe I should ask some of the guys at Soton’s SmartTea project for help with the audit, just to really blow the whole tea-making experiment thing out of all proportion.
March 3rd, 2007 at 7:10 pm
There’s another experiment to be done too, the ‘reboiled water’ issue has always bugged me.
I’ve heard several people say that reboiled water is no good for making tea “because its got less oxygen” which has always seemed bonkers to me, what with water being made up of two hydrogen atoms plus one oxygen atom per molecule there would appear to be an abundance of the stuff ripe for release at boiling point.
It seems obvious, but has anyone ever actually tested it in terms of flavour (which I’m supposing could be measured in terms of some measure of tea parts per million)?
March 4th, 2007 at 1:07 pm
Our teabags go on the compost heap…. can you compost sugary bags? I think you might become a target for ants.
March 13th, 2007 at 5:11 pm
Hi Rich,
As one of the UK’s most influential bloggers, we’d like to invite you to enter the Ask.com Best of Brit Blog Awards.
If so, then more information can be found at Ask.com.
All the best,
Stefan Kirchner, Ask.com.
March 13th, 2007 at 6:22 pm
/me blushes. It’s the new haircut, right?
March 14th, 2007 at 3:40 pm
Christ you can tell you’re a student!
March 16th, 2007 at 12:30 pm
Hey what’s that avatar plugin you’re using? Are those gravatars?
March 16th, 2007 at 1:47 pm
Hi Ozzy, it’s home grown-ish. It’s based on a gravatar plugin but it adds an override so I can add avatars for people I know - this has proved handy with the long gravatar downtime.
April 4th, 2007 at 8:10 pm
These are things I meditate on daily as owner of Tea & Sympathy, a place for tea time in the West Village of Manhattan.
This month, I’m trying to get the mayor to recognize the west village, home to the largest concentration of Brits in the Big Apple, as “Little Britain.”
Such a moniker will be in the spirit of neighbourhoods like Little Italy and Chinatown and become a welcoming place for Londoners and Britons alike.
Sign the petition at
http://www.campaignforlittlebritain.com!
(deadline is May 1!)
Check us out on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x96FrakUPfs