Speaking of Hot

Having apparently few other topics of interest to which to devote their collected brainpower, the Royal Society of Chemists and the Institute of Physics in the UK are wrangling over how to produce the best cup of tea. The physicists claim that the chemists are over complicating the matter, and the chemists sneer that the physicists’ obsession with simplification applies on so many levels.

I would like to put in a plea for scientific unity and argue that, if you follow both sets of advice, you will come up with a truly superlative brew. But it did not take the chemists and the physicists to tell me this. The most useful and enchanting book ever written about tea, Malachi McCormick’s A Decent Cup of Tea, clued me in to this long ago.

I must also give a cry of triumph over the RSC’s curt dismissal of the tea bag. When last in England I became involved in a tea disputation, and sides ended up oddly divided with Americans backing loose leaf tea and the Brits backing tea bags. Is this the pernicious effect of “Cool Britannia”? If it meant that one could get a decent cup of coffee throughout England, I suppose that would be progress of a sort, but those that have lived there have stories about the coffee that make my hair do the fretful porpentine. Besides with tea bags, you get all that extra paper littering the harbor, and those little strings would wrap around the necks of indigenous waterfowl. Loose leaf is much more versatile.