Tangled Up In Blue

The latest controversy to strike the office at my place of work is the vexed issue of tea scum. One half of the office insists it's caused by leaving the teabag in too long; the other half have an unshakeable belief that scum will occur if you put the milk in last.

 I once had the formation of tea scum explained to me by a scientist friend, so when the debate got heated for the second time and my opinion was canvassed, I couldn't stop myself from pointing out that although I couldn't remember the scientific explanation, I knew that neither camp was right and that the scum could be reduced by introducing acidity to the tea in the form of a drop or two of lemon juice.

This was met with a stony silence and then my colleagues resumed the debate. But my curiosity was piqued again and so I had to Google it. Turns out that tea scum was unexplained by science until the 1990s when research was conducted into the question that concluded that the calcium carbonate found in hard water is what allows scum to form in tea through oxidation at the tea's surface, and that scum can be eliminated either by using soft water or by introducing acid to the mix, for example with a drop or two of lemon juice.

Who knew?

A Short History Of and Lengthy Musings On: Tea

I love tea. It is a well-known fact about me, and one attested to by the boxes and boxes of different types of tea which are set out on my bookshelves. Oh, and the four different tea-sets I own.

My love affair with tea started when I was young, visiting my family in Ireland. One particular farmhouse, deep in the Irish countryside, was for many years the only place in the world that I would drink it.  Although precise statistics vary by study, Ireland undoubtedly has some of the highest annual per capita tea consumption in the world, so perhaps it was inevitable that I would become a complete tea addict sooner or later. Yet it was not some particular innate quality of the tea in Ireland which meant that as a seven year old I was prepared to drink it only there. It was the fact that my parents were so busy catching up with the family gossip that no-one noticed or objected when I regularly spooned half the sugar bowl's contents into my teacup.

What I never imagined at the time was that, in fact, my illicit sugary tea was part of a great tradition; some people believe that the Industrial Revolution in England and even the development of the British Empire were, in fact, influenced by the British people's love of tea. Boiling water before drinking it could combat some of the worst diseases of urban nineteenth-century Britain - including cholera, typhoid and dysentry, and on top of this, the tannins in tea act as a natural antiseptic. It's also suggested that the caffeine in tea helped workers in the new factories to make it through gruelling days of hard labour, at a time when the working day was shifting away from farming based around the solar cycle and towards indoor jobs timed by clocks. The reason that the Industrial Revolution happened first in Britain rather than elsewhere could be as simple as a cup of tea.

It isn't all teacups and rainbows, though. Tea was introduced to Britain in 1664 by Catherine of Baganza, the Portuguese wife of Charles II (interestingly, she's also credited with bringing the fork to England, although that innovation was rather slower to catch on; apparently it was seen as an effeminate affectation. Real men eat with their hands). This article notes that the increased demand for sugar to be taken with tea lead to growth of the slave trade, and that the Opium Wars with China in the nineteenth century were caused in part by tea; the British exported huge quantities of tea from China but found it difficult to create any successful imports to the country, until they began to develop the opium trade.

So it's a source of continual sadness to me that there's something about the (very hard) water where I currently live which means that the tea just doesn't taste as good, and it's one of the reasons I can't see myself living here long-term. Yes. Tea is that important to me. And I'm not the only one to take tea seriously.

This weekend I went to visit a friend in York and, naturally, drank copious quantities of Yorkshire Tea. The first time I really encountered Yorkshire Tea was immediately after my grandmother's death. My mother, with her usual waste-not-want-not attitude, brought my grandmother's half-used box of teabags home and insisted that we drink them all before she'd buy any more of our usual PG Tips. My tea consumption plummeted. I hated the stuff. It's very strong compared to the tea which I'd been used to drinking since childhood. But after a couple of weeks I became acclimatised to the flavour and now - well, if I ever have to move to Yorkshire, there'll be some consolation for being so far from my family.

Since then I've grown to like all different kinds of tea - herbal teas (more correctly, herbal infusions), green teas, Japanese genmaicha tea (also known as popcorn tea), American-style iced tea. Probably the most exotic example is the curious culinary experience I had on a trip to Canada a couple of years ago when I tried bubble tea - and loved it, despite its slim resemblance to any tea I'd ever drunk before. Bubble tea has now arrived in the UK, and I imagine that for the majority of tea drinkers here, the culture shock will be ten times worse than the surprise I felt on my first cup of Yorkshire Tea.

In conclusion: tea is always good. Go on, have a cup. You know you want to.