Investigating the molecular basis of a nice cup of tea

As a keen tea drinker I was intrigued by a January 2020 tweet in which @andrechemist wondered if a tetrahedral teabag produced a better cup of tea. The question sent me into the literature to see what chemists knew about the shape of teabags and the resulting brew. In fact, just what did chemists know about making tea more generally?

Quite a lot as it turns out. This should not have surprised me as tea is the most popular beverage in the world after water (a statistic nearly every paper on tea I read cited). In the end I wrote my own version of George Orwell’s 1946 essay, ‘A Nice Cup of Tea’ for Nature Chemistry. That essay grew into my book Steeped: The chemistry of tea.