From the Vault: Tea, Part 3

when flowers bud and birds chat on hot days by a lotus pond, burning incense in the courtyard after tipsy guests have left, when the youngsters have gone out on visits to secluded temples, when viewing springs and scenic rocks.

drink tea anytime. Anytime is a great time to drink tea. But here are some specific examples.

a tea podcast. And we're not exclusively a tea podcast, but there are a lot of great looking exclusively tea related podcasts out there, so certainly feel free to continue your tea journey with other shows, and if there's a particular topic related to tea that seems like something we should cover, well, we can always come back and do that. But if you didn't listen to the first two episodes on Tea, I highly recommend you go back and listen to those. We talked about, Oh, the botany of Tea.

We talked about a lot of the history of tea and conclude the basic Chinese and Japanese history of tea in this episode, with a few other bits and pieces in there. We also talked about tea mythology in the first episode. Now before we move on and also get into some of these interesting tangents, I wanted to clarify what we said in the last section about the phases

of tea because I think this can get confusing. So you have kind of like the primitive tea level, where it would be tea leaves dropped into boiling water, creating a bitter brew. Then you have this phase one of tea. This is where you have leaves dried and pressed into bricks, and then when you go to make it, you cut some of that brick off, you put it in water, and it ends up being kind of coarse and acidic. But this was kind of like the first phase, the

first era of tea. Then comes Phase two, where the leaves are steam dried and ground into a fine powder whipped into hot water. This is the Mancha style of tea. It's fresher, it has a fresher, grassier flavor. And then eventually you get to phase three, have steamed, cut, dried, oxidized, and sordid and steeped tea that creates basically most of the modern flavors of tea that we think of today. Now, there are plenty of examples that kind of blur the line.

You can still certainly get brick or cake, et cetera. Teas that are oxidized. Mancha tees are still used as well. So it's don't look at this as just like a strict evolution of form with past forms completely falling away. But I think it is a good structure to think of when we think about the evolution of tea. And as far as phase three goes, we will be getting into that later in this episode.

I really disliked this tea kettle for a number of reasons, and one of them is as follows, Rob, I'm sure you've had this experience a million times, whether it's from a poorly designed or vintage teapot, or I guess from

any vessel containing liquid. You fill it up and you go to pour it out into a cup or a bowl, but instead of pouring in a steady arc where you aimed it, the liquid coming out of the spout clings to the underside of the teapot spout and then runs down the side of the pot and dribbles all over the table, or the floor or your pants.

I think it is probably one of the most common sources of spills and stains around the kitchen, when you know, when you're trying to pour out of one container and it just doesn't pour the way you intended, It doesn't arc like you meant it to. Instead, it runs down the side.

ninety nine. That you can see how that fits with their kind of like a quaint, quirky sense of humor, like oh, teapots, but it looks like A fairly definitive paper on this question came out in twenty twenty one and it was by Bernhard Schikel, Robert I. Bowles, and Giorgio's Passias called developed liquid film passing, a smooth and wedge shaped trailing edge, small scale analysis and the teapot effect at large Reynolds numbers. This was published in the

Journal of Fluid Mechanics again twenty twenty one. By the way, if you scroll through this paper and check out the diagrams and equations, it's almost hilarious, like you would be shocked how complicated this looks. I'm not even going to pretend that I could make sense of it. Like I was trying to look and hack through this paper, I'm like, oh, this is hopeless. So instead I found a good article summarizing the results that includes an interview with one of

the lead authors. The article is by Jennifer Woolett for Ours Technica and this paper so it was a collaboration between researchers at the Vienna University of Technology and University College London, and they say that their paper here is a complete theoretical description of the teapot effect, which has eluded these researchers for decades. Finally they've got all the forces modeled here correctly, so they can fully predict what happens with a t spout of various designs pouring in

different ways. And they say the teapot effect has to include inertial, viscous, and capillary forces. So it turns out one of the major factors influencing whether the liquid dribbles or not is as you and I both intuited from

our experience flow rate. To people who have less experience in the kitchen, I think this might sound counterintuitive because, as you know, you were saying, rob, a lot of times when you're trying to be careful and not spill something, your instinct is to pour slowly because pouring slowly seems

like it's the careful option, right. Yeah, But as matches our experience at a higher flow rate, when liquid is coming out of the teapot or container faster, this actually makes the pouring action less likely to end up dribbling. That is how you are more likely to get the arc you're intending. It's actually once you start trying to

pour slowly, the dribbling becomes more likely. So you know, you can imagine all kinds of scenarios here, like if you're trying to pour something out slowly, to carefully measure a volume of liquid into another container like a measuring cup, or maybe you were trying to pour something in a slow stream to risk and emulsify it. You've seen people doing that. They dribble all the time.

like round lips are more likely to dribble. And apparently it would also help to coat the end of the spout in water repellent material so that the liquid or water based liquid doesn't want to cling to the underside of the lip. And this seems to be because the dribbling is partially the result of what the researchers call

a hydrocapillary effect. Basically, whenever you start to pour water based liquid out of a container, drops will form on the underside of the lip of the edge you're pouring from the like the spout of a teapot, So you know the water's coming out of the spout, but then on the under side of that spout there's going to be some droplet formation, and the rate at which you pour determines how big those drops on the underside of

the lip get. A high flow rate keeps them small, but a slow pouring allows the drops on the underside to become larger. And once those drops reach a certain critical size, once they get big enough, they actually start to grab hold of the water or tea or whatever that's coming out of the spout and redirect its flow down the side of the container instead of the arc that you're aiming for. Now, there was a thing that

I was thinking about. This is another design feature that I didn't see mentioned in this summary or in any of the papers I was looking at, but it's one that I've seen in some kettle designs, and it's a teapot spout, they can have an upward arcing curve right before the opening of the spout. For example, you see this on some gooseneck kettles. Rob, I've got an example for you to look at here if you scroll down, if you try to picture it, it's kind of a

curving swan neck shape. I don't know why I said, Swannik. They're literally called goose necks. The curving shape where if you imagine it in pouring position and you're trying to think how the liquid would have to travel to run down the bottom of the spout, it would literally have to go sort of uphill first before it would be able to run down the spout. And I think this

also helps it not do that. One last thing that I thought was pretty interesting, So they had to model all these forces that determine whether or not liquid dribbles when it's coming out. Again. Those forces included an inertial, viscous, and capillary forces, but there was actually a very little role for gravity. Gravity does not play a major role in causing the teapot effect, meaning that teapots will still dribble on the Moon or in other low gravity environments.

not a physical artifact. It is a thought experiment used by Bertrand Russell to explain a certain form of skeptical reasoning, specifically in his case, to support his lack of bully in God, though I think it could be applied to other scenarios. Now, I want to front load a caveat and say that some theistic philosophers think they have good arguments for why Russell's teapot analogy does not or should

not apply to beliefs about God. But even if you are inclined to agree with those critics, I think the teapot is useful to think about for a more general analogy for different types of beliefs that we hold in claims that we make. So very brief biographical background. Bertrand Russell lived from eighteen seventy two to nineteen seventy He was a famous British philosopher and public intellectual who was

incredibly influential in a number of different fields. So he was pre eminent in his academic fields of logic and analytic philosophy, but he was also a big cultural figure in Britain and an advocate for political causes such as anti imperialism, socialism and nuclear disarmament. But Russell was also infamous for being non religious. In nineteen fifty two, he was asked to write an essay for a London magazine called Illustrated, which came to be called is There a God?

And I think the essay was actually scrapped and not published in the originally intended venue, but Russell expanded upon it later and released it. And in the essay Russell uses the analogy of a teapot floating in space to explain his doubts about the existence of God. So I'm going to read from his essay here, and then we can we can analyze a little bit. So Russell says, many Orthodox people speak as though it were the business of skeptics to disprove received dogmas, rather than of dogmatists

to prove them. This is, of course a mistake. If I were to suggest that between Earth and Mars there is a China teapot revolving around the Sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion, provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be real even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I

should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books taught as sacred truth, every Sunday and instilled into the minds of children at school. Hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an

enlightened age, or of the inquisitor at an earlier time. Now, to take a moment to be fair to Russell's critics, I think they make some I'm not sure what I think about this, some potentially good points about the belief in the teapot not actually being analogous to belief in an omnipotent creator God, because they say, for example, the teapot is an object in the world that could only plausibly have come to orbit the Sun if humans had put it there, which we would probably know about if

it had happened. Meanwhile, God would not be an object in the world, but like the creator of the world, or somehow standing outside the world. And therefore, according to these theistic philosophers, the existence of God is like a proposition that is just not analogous to the existence of any physical object or entity that you could search for

in physical space. So I think a good way of phrasing this objection is that they're saying, well, belief in God is not a claim about something that exists in the universe, but rather a claim about the way the universe is. I'm not going to try to adjudicate that particular dispute about whether Russell is right that this is a good analogy for religious beliefs in God or whether

the critics are right that it is not. But either way, I think it is a useful thought experiment in a more general sense because it reminds us not to be taken in easily by unfalsifiable claims. And there's another thought experiment right along these lines that we've talked about on the show before. You might if you listened for a while, you might remember it, the thought experiment by Carl Sagan, The invisible Dragon in his garage. So Carl Sagan says, hey,

I've got a dragon that lives in my garage. And if you doubt this, you might say, well, okay, take me to your garage. I want to see it. And then Sagan says, no, no, no, no, no, you got it all wrong. It's an invisible dragon, so you shouldn't expect to be able to see it. I mean, you

can look but you're not going to see it. It is there, though, and then you could say, well, okay, then let's walk around in your garage, you know, with our hands outstretched and feel around for it until we finally come upon this dragon's invisible scaly back, and once again Sagan can say, no, no, hold on. It is

also an incorporeal dragon. It is made of spirit matter, not solid matter, so you shouldn't expect to be able to touch it, you know, that wouldn't disprove it that you can't feel it, And then you could go through more stages. I think he says that it's you might suggest, well, what if we use like an infrared heat detector, and then he could say, no, no, it's a dragon that does not produce any heat, and so on and so on.

You can go moving the goalposts of detection always backwards, so that there's no way to really check and see if the dragon is really there. I think the main point of both of these analogies, Russell's teapot and Carl Sagan's invisible Dragon, is that people can always try to get you to believe things by shifting the obligation of evidence onto you for doubting the existence, rather than assuming

that obligation themselves for claiming the existence. So it's the attitude of if I say X is true and you can't disprove it, you must accept it. And this is made doubly dangerous by like the rebuke of all potential investigatory tests. So in the case of Carl Sagan's dragon, that's like, oh no, no, no, it's invisible and you can't touch it and it wouldn't show up on infrared. But in the case of Russell's teapot analogy, it's that, well, the teapot is too small with any of our telescopes,

but I tell you it is there. And the point of both of these analogies is essentially I say X, if you can't disprove it, you must accept it. Is not a legitimate way to reason because that type of argument could be it could be used to force you to believe in a teapot orbiting the sun or an invisible dragon in the garage. Reasonable claims are based on evidence,

and most importantly, they are falsifiable. They entail certain physical predictions, like you should be able to see what I'm talking about if you look here, or you should be able to detect you know, the heat signature of the dragon if you look here, and if those predictions turn it false, the belief is probably false.

that's not the way it goes. And I think you see a more or I tend to see a more rational approach to this with some of the impossible or currently impossible to prove hypotheses so that we've discussed on the show before, like say the bicameral mind hypothesis or the stone ape hypothesis, like these are both I think examples of very thought provoking ideas that cannot be proved

or disproved, at least not currently. And I also don't see the major advocates of these hypotheses demanding that scientists disprove them like they seem to they understand how Russell's teapot or the invisible dragon works here and they know that it's on them to make the argument and provide the proof if there is such a thing.

know if the theory were wrong. So a theory should entail predictions about the world and all our good scientific theories do, and then you could go and check if those theories, if those predictions turn out true, and if it's a good theory, those predictions will turn out true, and if there's something wrong with the theory, those predictions will not turn out true. And if it's a really bad theory, it in fact will not make predictions at all.

It will just be sort of in this unfalsifiable space where it's like, well, there's no way to check if it's true.

teapot randomly floating in space. And I think this is a really good point that people should always keep in mind, because even if you are, for the most part a skeptical person, you will probably have biases along these lines. And I'll explain it in a second. But according to Russell, it's like, we only notice that the teapot claim is absurd because it is novel, because he just made it

up on the spot. If people went around appearing to sincerely believe in the teapot, I think it truly would start to seem less absurd, and it might start to get you know, equal time in the panel discussion on the news. Like like one example, why does it seem I would say, even to me, I have no beliefs in the healing powers of crystals, but why does it just feel more plausible to me that crystals have literal healing properties then that driftwood has healing properties. They're both

beautiful natural objects. If you want to fill your house up with them or put them by your bedside and all that, I think that's wonderful, But I don't think they like literally emit vibrations that drive away sickness or something. And I'd have to argue that the crystal proposition feels more plausible somehow, even though I don't believe it. And the reason is that this belief is familiar, and the

driftwood belief is not. People have been saying this about crystals, people seem to believe it, so you just kind of there's this feeling in your gut. Then it was like, well, there must be something to it then, But the fact that people say something does not necessarily give it any credence, even though it does have this power of giving it

the superficial appearance of rationality. And you know what, I would say, exactly the same thing is true of a lot of conspiracy beliefs, like you were talking about a minute ago, that like, once somebody has said something and appears to sincerely believe it, suddenly you kind of have this feeling in your gut like, oh, well, maybe there's something to that then, Whereas if somebody had said the same thing thing in the context of a thought experiment,

where they're obviously just making up an absurd belief on purpose on the spot, it wouldn't have that feeling.

we need to figure out why it's there. We have a few theories, you know, So like if you it kind of comes down to the whole situation of the old reality of you say lie enough times, then people will begin to believe it on some level, like you've just created the internal reality of the thing enough to where people can't quite get it out of their mind.

But by this point, like tea has so many ritualistic associations, cultural associations, and personal associations that there is a comfort tea kind of going back to that poem, there there are all these circumstances where it is the right time, it is the appropriate time, it is the comforting time to have a cup of tea, and therefore, yeah, I mean to at least some extent, like any cup of tea is going to do you good if you were a tea person.

It's something that is deeply enmeshed in culture and in people's lives and in all this so it's a lot harder to isolate the chemical mechanical properties of the molecules that enter your body when you drink tea, and like do these really fight disease? Or when you're studying correlations between tea use and other health outcomes, is that a secondary effect of some other correlation? Just because it's so much a part of human life. It's so much harder to study.

this would be a good, good example here. I wanted to go a little deeper into it. So I looked at a few different sources on this particular scenario, because on one level, it's not to say that the Mongols didn't like tea. They had already been exposed to Chinese tea trade earlier and apparently took to it. They valued

it as a digestive aid, among other things. Some of the sources I was looking at pointed out that there were particularities of like the traditional Mongol diet where it was nice to have a big caffeine punch to sort of move things along, you know. And also we have to remember, like there's there's definitely cultural transference. I mean, this is one of the sort of the famous aspects of Mongol rule in China is that these new rulers take on a lot of Chinese cultural things, and so

the transference is going to go both ways. But I've seen this mention of a decline in tea popularity during this period noted in multiple sources. Now there is an added wrinkle that I've seen discussed regarding the Marco Polo account, and I don't want to get into all the ins and outs of that and arguments about how historically accurate we should consider the Marco Polo account. That account barely mentions tea despite his visits supposedly taking place during this time.

But we know through other sources that there were plenty of tea houses still operating during this time period. And I think I've seen it argued as well that, Okay, if we're to take the Marco Polo account at face value, he was ultimately more interested in things that were Mongolian, and he saw tea as this non mongol thing and therefore didn't pay as much attention to it.

I was looking at is by Valerie Sartor. This was published in the American Journal of Chinese Studies in two thousand and seven. Is a paper title All the Tea in China. The Political Impact of tea.

houses remained popular hangouts for scholars and poets. In two thousand and fives Tea and Chinese Culture by Ling Wang, it's pointed out that the Mongol rule during the End dynasty was not only rule by non Han ethnic minority, it also filled many of its key positions with ethnic

minorities as well. Wang points out that while the Mongols during this time really took to tea, they also pushed things toward a mass produced product for the masses and pushed away from you know, the more like say, a exotic animal shaped tea cakes that had been popular in China prior to their coming to power. So you know, again, I think it's a more complicated, seeming historical issue than

one might expect. But I wonder if we might think of it as being kind of a cultural shift away from the glamour of tea as opposed to like, you know, an abandonment of tea or a decline of tea. Really it was still valued culturally among the Chinese as a beverage and a medicine, but it wasn't maintained as a socially elite thing with the kind of trickle down effects of that social elitism that you would see during this time period.

it definitely goes down. Your average experience of this cocktail is maybe a bit mediocre until such time as someone brings it back and starts pushing the boundaries again and figuring out, like, what works about this cocktail, what can I improve upon, what new twists can I do to it? And in what ways can I go back to the original version of this cocktail? That sort of thing. So, but either way, during the Mongo rule, I think we can generalize and say that tea culture has stagnated a bit.

Nobody seemed to have been advancing tea so much or pushing the boundaries of tea. But then you have the establishment of the Ming dynasty in thirteen sixty eight, and it's in this dynasty we see yet another revival of t And it's not to say that it's as simple as the Ming dynasty simply announcing hey, Ta's back on the menu, because again, it was never off the menu.

And in fact, according to weighing in Tea and Chinese culture, the tea loving scholarly class, they were somewhat cracked down on during this Initially during this period, as were various other perceived threats as the Ming solidified their rule. Though interestingly enough, one of the founding hong Wu Emperor's sons became a key scholar and proponent of TA during this time.

This was an individual by the name of Zu Kwan, and he wrote a manual on T and much of the Ming tea ceremony culture to follow would be based on the ideas presented in this manual T as this ritualized cleanser of the soul. So on one hand, yes, you have imperial folks pushing tea again, accepting TA. You can get kind of like that, that trickle down attraction to the beverage again. But it's also during this period that we enter phase three of tea, in which tea is picked, withered, dried, rolled,

and oxidized. The result is dried, loose leaf tea that can then be steeped for a set number of minutes to create a smooth and rich beverage. It was easier to process this way, as Laura C. Martin points out in the History of Tea, and it better enables the incorporation of dried fruits and spices as well as flowers. All these were ingredients the Chinese tea enthusiasts during this day and tea masters definitely explored, and you see this

a lot in tea today as well. Also during this time, the Honglow Emperor himself proclaims that only this new method of loose leaf tea is going to be acceptable as tribute. So tea tributes made to the Emperor and his household they have to be this new phase three t The scholarly class apparently held out a little bit longer, sticking to their older traditions, traditions again that they had they

had stuck to through foreign rule. But even they eventually realize, hey, oolong tea is really good and they start drinking oolong tea instead.

bring out more flavor. But at the same time, it's thought that the invention of the teapot was largely more of a repurposing of pre existing wine oers and then adapting the design for tea, so, for instance, the handle being placed on the side of the teapot as opposed to on top of the teapot for easier access, though of course we still have a lot of teapots today where you have the handle on top that kind of

folds to the side. Also, smaller pots, because while it might make sense to have a larger pot that you have filled with wine to distribute at a party or something if you're making tea in it. You don't want to make so much tea in the pot that everything gets over steeped. Because you oversteep your tea, it's going to take on a bitter and undesirable flavor. I imagine many

of you out there have encountered this before. Perhaps you get a pot of tea at a restaurant and there are not enough of you drinking it, or you're drinking it at such a slow pace that by the end it's pretty strong and maybe a bit bitter.

seasoned by the tea. And they could also be quite beautiful. But there are some mentions in the old writings about tea that like, oh, we have a nice tea here, but you're serving it out of the wrong pot. You need a properly seasoned pot otherwise it's just not going to taste it. Now, we mentioned Oolong tea already, but obviously this is the time during which black tea is discovered.

You know that we could realize that we can have this this highly oxidized black or red tea as it's generally referred to in China, and as Mary Lou and Robert J. Heies discuss in the Story of Tea, a cultural history and drinking guide that came out in two thousand and seven. The discovery of black tea oxidation as a process was originally thought only suitable for barbarians and foreigners.

or something to that effect. But the other interesting thing about this is that like the resulting tea would simply keep longer and could therefore be shipped further both by land and by sea, and so the brick tea that started reaching Mongolia and to bet that would be black brick tea. Meanwhile, green tea bricks those more easily suffered from overheating from freezing, and it often developed mold in

damp environments. So yeah, we get into the situation where the farther out you're sending your tea, the more where it makes sense for it to be black tea. And perhaps early on you're just like, well, yeah, get send that black stuff out of here. That's going to Mongolia, that's going to Tibet. But then of course over time it catches on, people start experimenting with it, and you

get so many splinterid black teas as well. But at the same time black tea of course becomes the tea to catch on in the Western world and catch on

by storm. There's a good great deal of Martin's The History of Tea that of course just deals with this, like how tea reaches Europe and how it I mean, because it's so crazy to think about this as well, like modern Britain and not even modern brit but historically Britain and tea so inseparable, like it is held up as this thoroughly British thing, but of course it is entirely an import one interesting thing. This is something we've

discussed on an older episode of the show. But like thinking again about black tea being considered this thoroughly British thing, and yet at the same time, there seems to have been at least a mild panic Britain in the nineteenth century about green tea making people hallucinate unlike proper black tea.

color more exciting for Western customers, and so they were throwing in some perhaps less than healthy substances to try to enhance the coloration of the green tea. Hmmm.

body to release more cortisol. And another explanation that I remember from that episode was that people who use caffeine a lot, say three or more cups of coffee per day, are simply more prone to mental health associations that cause hallucination. So you know, there are various various ways to tease it apart if there's nothing special about green tea itself, unless it is, of course, has some sort of horrible substance added to it potentially to make it more hallucinogenic.

But yeah, it's just kind of interesting in terms of the britishness or foreign nature of tea as perceived in

England in the nineteenth century. All right, one final area. Again, We're not going to follow tea all around the world and cover all the various variations and customs on this show, but I think it is important to at least touch on Japanese tea culture and history a bit as well, because like knowing when and how tea reaches Japan is also important because Japanese culture has contributed so much to

our global understanding and appreciation of tea. In fact, a number of the teas that I drink are Chinese teas, but I did make sure that I was drinking a Japanese tea when I was working on this section of the notes.

This is one you have to be precise with. But if you if you just give it the appropriate amount of time at the appropriate temperature, it's thoroughly delightful, very smooth green tea. So tea culture as I was reading in most of my main source and this was Martin, but tea culture was originally introduced into Japan via Buddhism during the reign of Prince Chautauku, who lived five seventy

four through six twenty two. This is a semi legendary figure, though there's nothing too legendary about the basic premise here, So this is not a story that involves the machinations of gods or supernatural deities. Basically, you had scholars traveling to China during this time studying Buddhism and in the process also learning to drink and cultivate tea. Now, this is definitely the Phase one era of tea at this point, So there's that level of tea technology that they have.

This is the two level of tea technology that they're bringing back with them.

is this and he's like, drink it. It's going to enhance everything you're doing today, trust me, And supposedly they end up embracing it up until the ninth century, when Sino Japanese relations strained somewhat. There is a lot of cultural transference there, with tea customs and practices entering into Japan from China, much of it tied to Buddhist practices and the tastes of the Imperial court at that time.

In the ninth century, however, diplomatic ties between the countries dried up, and tea culture in Japan didn't really progress for a good three centuries. Its popularity to decrease, and its use was then limited mostly to monasteries, which is interesting because all this kind of mirrors what we saw during Mongol rule in China. But then during the twelfth century, relations between Japan and China improved, and it's during this period that the Monk Asi introduced both the Rinzai Zen

Buddhism practice as well as whipped tea to Japan. So this is phase two once more with Asi. Here he's advocating tea as a key tool for Zen Buddhist practitioners as well as a quote divine remedy and supreme gift of heaven. Martin writes that Asi proclaimed t as the cure for or loss of appetite. Illness is caused by poor drinking, water, paralysis, boils, and what we would come

to know of as a thimine deficiency. He saw tea drinking as something that benefited each organ in a different way, as well as the spiritual aspects of a person as well, just so everywhere it could go to leak into all your organs and into your spiritual structures, and it's just going to cleanse everything out and make everything better.

By the mid fourteenth century, tea houses were a popular secular hangout as well, and it seems to have taken on a not only a secular air, but kind of a boisterous quality as well. They're apparently a number of tales of tea drinking exploits. Some of these exploits were tied to just drinking a whole lot of tea. There are accounts of like fifty cups, one hundred cups, though I don't think this is necessarily for an individual, but maybe more for like a group or a table.

what region it's from. That sort of thing, And the tea service during this time was also formalized as a part of politics. So really it's like at every level of the socioeconomic structure, tea ends up finding a place.

Tea culture would come to impact various levels of design as well, from the physical instruments of tea brewing of course in Japan, but also this would end up being tied into the architecture of tea huts that were specially designed to blend into the natural environment and be part of this sort of like nature based understanding of tea and tea drinking.

It is not delicate, little anything that would result in dribbling.

the field. But in the resteeping of tea bags, one error that we have to keep looking out for in my house is you have an already wet tea bag and you're going to do your second or third steep, you put it in there, you have some new hot water added. If the tea bag is kind of partially hanging over the edge of the of the tea cup or the mug, then you'll have this kind of wicking effect where the water comes up through the tea bag and then gets all over the countertop. If you ever had this.

tea traditions. And again, we're already at this point. I don't think we've gotten to share any of these in listener mail yet, but we're already hearing from some folks about some of their favorite ways to prepare tea, things that are either personally or culturally important to them. So we would love to hear from everyone out there. If

there's a particular tea you love, let us know. For my own part, and I'm doing this recording especially, I have a bit of a sore throat and a cold a cough going on, and I depended heavily on a puer tea called Evil Snake King. And normally I just take it straight, but for this I added a lot of honey to it. So normally I don't put anything into the teas that I drink, but man, if my throat is a little bit sore, I can add some honey, maybe even some lemon to that and it'll really get me through.

out other episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind. Our core episodes come out on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast feed On Mondays. We do those listener mail episodes. On Wednesdays we do a short form artifact or monster fact, and on Fridays we set aside most serious concerns and just talk about a strange film.