Meeting 8 - Electronics & Beer

As is usual for tea club, we performed tangentially related activities. A tangent so long that one may struggle to see the connection with tea. That is indeed why we are named “Tea and Stuff”, because as well as tea, we do stuff.

Activity 1 was the rewiring of the living room electronics. The once calm ocean of sparse wires behind the TV had turned into a raging, foaming storm of labyrinthine cables, voltage transformers, device chargers, switches and assorted playing cards. To rectify this mess, every last thing was unplugged - even the router! Then in an orderly and logical fashion, only the necessary objects were plugged back in. Namely; the router, TV, N64.

Activity 2 was playing Mario Kart on the N64. Accompanied by tea.

The tea of choice was Whittard’s 1886 Tea. We all agreed that it was good, though, despite its fancy name, it tasted quite standard. Not dissimilar to English Breakfast.

We also had another tea, a more fruity one. Unfortunately the name of it escapes me, but I do remember that it took only 2 minutes to brew, and tasted best with sugar. Edit: The tea was Whittard’s Cherry Blossom tea.

Also perhaps tangentially related to tea club: our home brew beer operation. All beer has been siphoned out into bottles - 48 bottles to be exact, and a 5 litre container for the rest. At the bottom of the barrel was a thick layer of sediment. It looked most displeasing, definitely not appreciably consumable. However, in the name of science we filled a whole bottle with the stuff, chucked in several spoons of sugar, and capped it tight.

Over the subsequent couple days, this experimental sedimentary bottle built up such pressure that it would regularly burst out clumps of sedimentary slime, and make a faint pungent aroma waft by. The contents of this bottle split into 3 layers in the first couple days: at the bottom, a couple of inches of thick sludge; in the middle, a couple of inches of beer-like liquid; and at the top, a thick forest of foamy bubbly goo. The top layer has since shrunk and vanished entirely.

We speculate that the concoction of this experimental sedimentary bottle will perhaps taste foul. Nonetheless, consumption of it may be attempted in due course.

The entire batch of home brew should be finished in less than 2 weeks. For the next batch, we may try adding some tea bags into the fermentation process to make the artful combination - Tea Beer.