Sorry about the silence these past few days, I hope my followers/followees can forgive me, came down with a mystery illness that's knocked me cold the past 3 days. But on with show, I'm back, here with my cup of tea. Well, with the news front being strangely un-interesting, let's look into Britain's favourite hot beverage:
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| Tea |
1/. The British population drink 165 million cups daily or 60.2 billion per year.
Taking the average tea bag to be 3.5g (warning: dodgy science inbound, I weighed a tetley tea bag pre-dunk just for this), that equates to 557.5kg of tea wrapped in thin paper bags a day. That's about err... Half a small car? A baby elephant's worth? Okay, that's not as impressive as I'd hoped to be. But it's still a shit load of tea.
NB: That's >99% black tea by the way.
2/. We (the Brits) care about tea so much, we started a war about it.
Okay, so I'm not really proud about this one, and it's a tenuous link anyway, but I'm referring to the Opium Wars. (warning: dodgy history inbound) In a nut shell, the East India Trading Company (the British trading force at the time) were buying Silk, Porcelain and Tea from the Chinese. To fund this spending spree the British imported Opium, and sold it to smugglers. The Chinese weren't too happy about this, and so restricted trading and forced the Opium traders to turn over their stock. As a result, the British decided to take control of all the ports and forcefully negotiate. So there. Don't mess with our tea imports.
PS: This is all summed up in the highly addictive game High Tea (flash game, free to play, probably not historically accurate).
3/. Spiders freak out on caffeine.
See the comparison picture of a spiders web:
Sorry again about the silence, I'll be catching up with all my fellow bloggers in the next day or two, and there'll be another blog post on Saturday at latest.
I love tea though, it's pretty much the best stuff in the world! The spider/caffeine thing is mad interesting, too.
ReplyDeleteThat is one trippin' spider.
ReplyDeleteCool post! The spider web is crazy.
ReplyDeleteits like cocaine for them, think about what coke can do to them
ReplyDeleteI need to get a spider... and give it caffeine... be back with my results later.
ReplyDeletereally interesting and funny, lol.
ReplyDeleteAlong with everyone else on here, I'm interested in the spider web hahaha. Also, I'm a coffee man myself. Your blog is consistently a good read, keep up the good work, and don't sweat the little stuff :)
ReplyDeleteI've never enjoyed Tea, but seeing how its the most popular drink after water, i should give it another go.
ReplyDelete