A guide to enjoying a lab brew

The tea break can be the only thing that keeps you going during those painfully long and repetitive experiments. But enjoying the humble cup of tea might be trickier than you thought…

The first time a human found that putting bits of bush into water and boiling it over a fire made a slightly bitter drink was an important moment in human history. From there, human society developed whilst fiercely defending hot water-making fire with sharpened sticks. The next several thousand years has all been about collecting more leaves, making better fire and wielding sharper sticks.

But despite the millennia of tea drinking, often, making something as fundamental as a brew is fraught with difficulty. So here are a few tips…

1. Find a mug

There may be mugs around that people say you can use. These mugs are traps – half of them will belong to people who, on seeing you drinking from it, will swear a decade long vengeful vendetta against you. The other half have been the shared mugs for so long that their glaze is now made up a unique microbial mix that will almost certainly kill anyone that hasn’t slowly built up a tolerance.

So most people have their own, and the sensible ones make sure that it is GPS tracked and secured with a claymore based defence system.

2. Find tea

Your selection is likely to consist of left over tea bags left by ex-employees. Ignoring the ancestral age of this tea, it is worth taking time to double-check that the ex employees left happily and not in a poisonous rage.

The obvious solution to this is to have brought your own tea bags, which, like the mug, you carefully guard and protect from co-workers.

3. Find hot water

If you are lucky enough to work in a physics lab you may be able to find high tech sources of fire like lasers or scary electrical power sources – but most of us will need to rely on the humble kettle.

Shared kettles mean shared cleaning – which means no cleaning. Every shared kettle is about half cheap plastic and half limescale. Being cheap and covered in limescale this makes the average kettle about as safe to use as a live grenade being repeatedly hit with a hammer – so caution is recommended.

4. Find a place to make it

Remember, nothing inspires others to make tea more than seeing someone get their tea bags out of the special tea safe. So your best bet is to look for somewhere quiet and isolated where you can make your cup of tea in peace. Look for the small unused meeting room or even the cleaning cupboard that has been left unlocked.

5. Drink

By now, if you have followed the advice on this list, you should be quietly huddled in a small closet with your personal tea making kit and a sharpened pencil. Just the way your primitive ancestors would have liked it.

Author:

[caption id="attachment_39565" align="alignnone" width="200"] Dr Matthew Partridge is a senior Research Fellow at the Optoelectronics Research Centre at the University of Southampton but describes himself as a biochemist who has accidentally ended up working with optical sensor systems.[/caption]