FACTORALY - E123 TEA

Episode Date: January 15, 2026

Tea is part of the British way of life - but it started thousands of miles away. There is only one tea plant - a Camelia - but all the varieties come from it. In this episode, you'll find a variety of facts about tea and how it's changed the world. As always, go to the show notes on the blog at Factoraly.com to spill the tea on this great beverage. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello, Bruce. Good day, Simon. How are you today? I'm feeling flummoxed. Flummoxed? Yes, there's a thing I'm doing at the moment, which is flummoxing me. I don't think I've ever heard the word flummox use as a present participle verb. How interesting.

What's flummoxing you? Oh, do you know what? It's always nice to try something new. And I'm trying to do something new at the moment. I'm writing a soundtrack for a film. Oh, are you? Yeah. How interesting.

and it's harder than it looks. And it looks really hard. Yeah. Oh, there's another string to add to your bow. Yes, yes. Once I get the hang of it, I'm sure it'll be fine. Fine. Okay, good.

Good. So this is, this begins with an F. I should know what it is. Why? Friday. Friday? No, because it's Thursday. Thursday.

Oh, it's factorialy, isn't it? Yeah, that's what it is. That's the one. Yeah. How would you describe factorily to the? uninitiated. It's sort of light green with a tinge of blue. Really? I had it more as sort of light blue

with a tinge of green. It's a lot of useless or useful, depending on your point of view, information about subjects that we have picked for us at random by a subject picker from a list of over 500 at the moment. Indeed. Yes. And sometimes they come up

in their sort of like quite obscure subjects that we struggle to make 30 minutes out of. But we do. Oh, we do. And sometimes there are enormous subjects that are the stuff of life, like we did with a few weeks ago with seeds. And sometimes it's another sort of stuff of life. Yes. Especially if you're British. Absolutely.

Like this week. So this week we are doing tea. Shall we take tea together? I don't drink tea. I drink fresh mint tea and jasmine tea and things like that, but I don't drink sort of like builders. So I do drink tea, proper tea. I prefer coffee. Please see our episode on coffee.

But if coffee is not available, I do like a cup of tea now and then. Will you say please see our episode on coffee? Yes. How many times is it we've mentioned tea? Oh, by the magic of a particular website that we've discovered that gives you statistics. We've talked about tea 22 times across our previous episodes without ever having done an episode on tea. Yes. So just in passing.

So things like we were talking about lions, which meant we talked about Lions Cornerhouse, we were talking about predictions, like reading tea leaves. We were talking about money where. bricks of tea we used. We're talking about poison, smells, birthdays, spoons, cakes. Like so many different things we've talked about. Jam, which led us to scones, which led us to cream teas. Yes. It's everywhere. It's just seeped into our everyday conversation without us even realising it. And we didn't know. So it's about time. We did an episode on tea. I think tea deserves its very own episode. I think it does. So

with that in mind, here we go. So char. Yes. What is char tea? things. How long have you got? Right from the start, let's just say this may well run over the 30 minute prescribed time length because this is just a very big topic. So char, let's start right there. Char is the original Chinese word for tea. So how many different ways did you find that tea had been invented? Oh, loads. Loads and loads of different ways. What was your favourite? My favourite and one that I've actually come across personally quite a few times. In one of my many branches of voiceover work, I do some e-learning content for a company in China. And every now and then I get to read something about Chinese myths and legends and history. And goodness me, the number of times I've come

across this fella called Emperor Shenong, who apparently was sitting out in the field one day making some, well, not really making anything. You had a pot of boiled water going on the stove. Sounds delicious. Sounds delicious. and some leaves from a mysterious tree fell off and fell into his boiling water and rather than being suspicious of it and thinking, I hope that's not poisonous, he took a gulp and went, hmm, that's nice. So apparently he invented, discovered, first started drinking tea in approximately 2,700 BC. Wow.

So it's been with us for quite a long time. And this is the first of many accidents. A tea seems to be really accident prone. It does. And as we go through the episode, you'll hear that there are various other accidents. Yes. Lots of serendipitous occurrences. Yes.

But whoever invented it, you know, myth or legend or whatever, that's essentially what it is. It's a leaf that you pick off a tree. I didn't realize this for a start. Tea trees, we sort of think of, you know, tea plants as being short shrubby. items. And it's always puzzled me why we call it a tea tree, not a tea bush. Their bushes, because we cultivate them that way to make it easier to pick. Originally, tea trees were trees, and you climbed up a ladder and picked the leaves off the tree. We cultivated and pruned them to make them shorter so that they can be picked, you know, whilst walking along.

Okay. Obviously, you know, there's lots of different sorts of tea out there. Yeah. Except they're on. Well, we view them as different sorts of tea. It's more to do with how the plant is processed, how it's grown, and at what stage of its life you pick the leaves. And how it's oxidised. Yeah. The three main types, as I understand it, are green tea, black tea, white tea. And that's more about what season the leaves are picked, how they're treated and dried. So this is a camellia, isn't it? It's called the chamelea synensis. Oh, well pronounced. Yes, it's related to the chamelea. Yes. Isn't that funny? Yeah. The word char. I find this very interesting. Chinese symbols, I think, are fascinating. Again, my work in China has led me to sort of look at some of these symbols. Chinese symbols are not alphabetic.

They're more descriptive. So a symbol actually represents a thing. If you look at the symbol for char, it's made up of three different parts or radicals, they're called, the parts that make up the symbol. And the three radicals in the symbol for char are a symbol that represents, herbs, a symbol that represents a person and a symbol that represents a tree. And it literally depicts the act of a person picking leaves from something that's somewhere between a herb and a tree. Wow. So it's very, very descriptive. And that symbol is pronounced char. That then

changed into a couple of different variants, totally dependent on the root that it took. This is fascinating. So when tea sort of started spreading to the rest of the world, somewhere around the 8th century, it went by two different routes. The Dutch came to South China and brought tea from there. In South China, they pronounced that word more like Che rather than Char. The Dutch took that word and took it across the sea to the rest of Europe. That Chee became te, which is why we have tea, the French have te, etc, etc. Okay. The other route is that it was taken across land via the Silk Road from Mandarin Canton. Their pronunciation is more like char and therefore the places that that route goes to, you know, in Hindi it's

chai, in Arabic it's shai, in Russian it's chai. So is that why in the eastern they call it char? That's why they call it char, a cup of char, which is its original name. You say it's spread around the world. It had a bit of help. I'm sure it did. What sort of help did? What sort of help did you fund that it had. You know how we don't really talk about our colonialist past? Yes. Well, it didn't used to grow in India. No. And then we discovered that we could nick it from China and started growing it in India, in Assam and various different places. Yeah. And yeah, so then it was very popular in India. Yes. I remember as a kid hearing the two main options, you know, do you want Chinese or Indian? Yes. That's preposterous because it's all

tea is Chinese, we then nabbed it, took it to India, which we occupied at the time, and grew it there. So it's all that. It's all the same chamelea. Yes, exactly. I mean, grown in a different way. Yeah. Yeah. Different elements, different climate may perhaps. Yeah. Well. I found it interesting that the East India Company, again, something we may not talk about terribly often because they had a certain number of practices that weren't wonderful. The British East India Company or the Dutch East India Company? The British East India Company. The British one. I don't know enough about the Dutch one to lump it in with the same thing. Because the Dutch one is, you talked about it going to Holland and the Netherlands and that was the Dutch East India Company.

That's right. Yeah. Nicked it from there. Yeah. But yes, the British East India Company only started trading with China because of the rise in the popularity of tea in the 17th century. Yes. And then the East India companies totally had the monopoly on the Chinese tea trade. Yeah. They, together with the British government and the tax. taxation and the revenue that came from that were sort of largely responsible for it becoming the national drink that it has become. Yes. But I find this history fascinating. You know, how on earth did this leaf from China become the absolute staple of British culture? It seems like a really odd jump.

Not just British, though. I mean, it's all over the world. It is everywhere, isn't it? But we claim tea as our own. Yes, we do, don't we? We very much do. A nice cup of tea. Proper British tea, an English breakfast tea.

Yes. But there's also things like Matcha, which is a kind of a tea, isn't it? And that's about a thousand years old. Yes, I'd only recently heard of this. Yeah, me too. It's like just suddenly become the trendy drink. This bright green stuff suddenly started cropping up in coffee shops, ironically. And I didn't know what it was.

It's disgusting, as far as I can tell. Yeah, me too. I don't like tea in the first place, but Patrick just looks like taking it to another level. But matcha is essentially powdered green tea, the particular tea plant that it comes from. They grow them in the shade rather than in the sun. Okay. And it makes the leaves a really, really bright green colour, which is why you get this vial cup full of luminous green stuff. But you also have chai, don't you?

Another relatively recent phenomenon. And bubble tea and all sorts of... Oh, yeah. I don't understand those things for a moment. No, I don't get that. It's a trend, isn't it? It is. It's all cool.

It's all cool and trendy, and therefore we don't drink it. There's bubble tea shops all over Camden. Yes, I'm sure. I think we have may have mentioned this on another episode. But during the Second World War, the British government spent more by weight on tea than on ammunition. Yeah, I remember that, yes. I think there were 30 million tons of tea in the UK during World War II as a reserve.

That's incredible, isn't it? Just to keep the morale up. Yeah. Amazing. Wow. I found a couple of names that were sort of influential in the rise of the popularity of tea in this country. You know, again, how on earth did we get from a Chinese plant to a British staple?

When tea first came here, it was seen as a medicinal herb. Right. People would drink it for good health. Well, it is good for you. Well, yes. Antioxidants and all those things. But it was only in the mid-17th century. Apparently a lady called Catherine of

Braganza, which I've never heard that name before, but apparently she married Charles 2nd in 1662. She's from Portugal, where they were already quaffing tea left right and centre. Of course, yes. And apparently, well, depends on who you believe, either the East India Company did it or Catherine of Braganza did it. She brought a little chest of tea from her homeland and gave it to Charles II as a wedding gift. And so all of a sudden, overnight, the Royal Court in England was drinking tea because of her. You know, she would have ladies in her inner circle come round to take tea. And it was all very posh and elegant and expensive.

Yes. And she was adding sugar to it and all these sorts of things. Again, very, very expensive at the time. So it became this lavish, luxurious, delicate thing. You know, she was serving it in porcelain imported from China. And it was just this very, very elegant, elegant thing. at a time when coffee, see our previous episode, was already popular. Yes.

Apparently, the first cup of tea to be sold publicly in Britain was in a London coffee house. Okay. So it was this novelty. You know, coffee had already sort of gained popularity. And then this novelty of tea came along, and they started serving it in a coffee house just around the corner from the Royal Exchange in London. So it was this fancy novelty oriental drink. that sort of soon became more and more popular with the upper echelons of society. Yes.

And then the middle echelons of society thought, I want to have some of that to make myself look more fancy. So it became popular with them. And then eventually it sort of reduced in price. And so the lower classes were able to start drinking it. It became an absolute staple of workmen left right and centre during the 1800s. Builders. Builders tea. That's why we call it Builders tea. Yeah.

You talk about sort of well-minute sort of. famous people having tea. I've read about two famous people who are associated with tea. One I like, which is Mrs. Gladstone. Okay. Mr. Gladstone being the prime minister at the time. Prime minister of Victorian Britain. And because he used to have very late sittings in the House of Commons and things like that. When you get home, you basically just want to get straight to bed. And what they used to do in the old days is hot water bottles were actually like a ceramic or a stone. Oh yes they were. Actually a real bottle. Yes.

So what Mrs Gladstone would do is she'd make Mr. Gladstone a cup of tea or actually a pot of tea and then pour the pot of tea into a hot water bottle to warm up his side of the bed. So when he got home from Parliament, he could actually get into a nice warm bed and drink the hot water bottle. Oh, that's delightful. Which is great, isn't it? Why on Mrs. G? Well, then Mrs. G. Another woman who's actually slightly strange about tea

She's not British She's Australian is Kylie Minogue Right So I happen to read that Kylie Miloge She has like proper leave tea in a teapot And when she has it she turns it Turns the pot three times clockwise And one time anti-clockwise

Before she actually pours the tea How interesting And I understand from a very good friend of mine Jen That The reason you do this is to settle the tea leaves to the bottom of the pot. Oh, really? I didn't know that. I didn't know that either.

How interesting. I've seen that done because, well, not in person, but, you know, in videos. Chinese tea culture, the Chinese tea ceremony and subsequently the Japanese tea ceremony, very, very formal, very elegant, lots of procedure. And I think they do something similar. They sort of rotate the pot and do various bits and bobs. so I wonder if she's got it from that. So we do have a blog on our website at factorily.com.

Factorily.com. That's the one. So if you go to those show notes, you will find videos of the tea ceremony. Yes, brilliant. And what you will find as part of that tea ceremony is the turning of things. But you will also find a thing called a tea pet. Tea pet? A tea pet, like a P-E-T pet.

Okay, what's that then? So a teepet is a little Buddha-like statue that sits in the middle of the, all the paraphernalia of the tea ceremony. And as you warm up the pots and you warm up the cups and you warm up the various bits, when you get rid of the water, you pour the water, like the tea, over the teapet.

Oh. And over time, the teapet absorbs the tea. And so it becomes shiny and it becomes something special that's unique to you, that's your teapet. Wonderful. It's very easy to sort of think that the way we do tea is the way tea

has always been done. But in China, they used to use tea bowls rather than cups. That's right. Yes, a bowl of tea. And with that, you put the leaves into the bowl. You pour the hot water into the bowl and you drink straight from the bowl. You don't brew it in another implement and then pour it into the cup. So when you've drained that bowl, it still has the leaves in the bottom.

You then put more water in. And the second bowl of tea is a different flavour because the leaves have been more infused. and then it changes and changes and, you know, it's sort of part of the whole process. And the Chinese tea ceremony is a very sort of respectful and harmonious thing. That symbol I mentioned that represents char has come to mean peace and harmony and respect and dignity as well as meaning tea. Yes. The two things are sort of quite interchangeable. Interesting.

Oh, I tell you who else famous has a connection with tea. Go on. So there was a British guy called David Jones who went on a family holiday. And he was given tea, which had been sitting around for a very, very, very long time, which was disgusting. And this turned David Jones later to become David Bowie. Off tea. He was teapobic. He hated the sight of tea.

Really? Yeah. I didn't know that. So there you go. Another name I came across associated with tea. is Anna Maria, the Duchess of Bedford. Ooh. We've got some great names today, haven't we?

And apparently she is often credited with the creation of the afternoon tea. Oh, with the full crusts off cucumber sandwiches. All that stuff. Bits of cake and all that sort of thing. See our episode on cucumber. Into. And probably cake. Now, afternoon tea had already become a thing in as much that early Victoria,

workers were given tea in sort of the late afternoon, purely on the basis of the fact that it would increase the number of hours that they could get away with working them. Okay. So if people are not knocking off to go home for dinner because that's the only break they've had, if you give them a tea break, then, you know, they can keep on going. Get an extra couple of hours. Exactly. So having afternoon tea was already a working class thing.

But in 1840, the Duchess of Bedford came up with the idea of, sort of having her her posh friends round for afternoon tea with delicate little sandwiches and delicate little cakes and all this is when it moved from being like tea like the six o'clock when you get back from work meal yes to tea the four o'clock sandwiches and a cup of tea meal exactly yes yeah and it was very popular you know all the sort of her literary friends came around for tea and the idea spread and more and more people started doing it and it was pretty much off the back of that, the popularity of having tea

mid to late afternoon, that tea houses first came about. We already did sort of tea houses and tea rooms in our episode on lions. You cleverly shoehorned in because of lions. But yeah, they sort of came about

because of this trend that was happening in high society. And then even Queen Victoria herself started having an afternoon tea purely off the back of the popularity that had risen from the Duchess of Well, there you go. And then the Victoria sponge was created in honour of the fact that Queen Victoria ate a piece of cake with her afternoon tea. Isn't that lovely? Isn't that brilliant? There was another

tea room that actually predates Lyons, which I feel I've heard you mentioned before. Maybe you mentioned it at the time, but there was a chain of tea shops called ABC. The ABC bakeries, yeah. Yeah. Associated bakery company or something like that. So I looked this up. It's called the aerated bread company. That's the one. That's the one. Which is lovely. They used to be one of those where I grew up. Oh, was there really? Yeah. And in 1864, they opened up the very first ABC tea shop.

Because up until that point, you know, tea was sort of being served in coffee shops and that was pretty much it. But women weren't really allowed to go out for tea or for dinner on their own. They had to be chaperoned. They had to be escorted by a bloke. The ABC tea shops came up with the idea that actually, no, we're happy to have ladies come here for tea on their own. What a radical thought. And spill the tea. And spill the tea. Yes, exactly. Very good. And this sort of came about the manageress of ABC tea shops had sort of started giving away free, you know, snacks and bits of cake and so on. And it gained popularity. But yes,

all of a sudden, in the mid sort of 1800s, ladies suddenly had the right to gather together in a public space, drink their tea, eat their sandwiches. And that was a very, very helpful to the suffrage movement. You know, the fact that they were actually allowed to congregate in public. So, in a way, tea is responsible for women's lib, as far as I can tell. Yeah, no, I think you're right. That's impressive. At the beginning of the podcast, I talked about accidents. Yes.

Mostly up until now, it's been tea leaves, what we call loose leaf tea. Yes, exactly that. And there was a guy who sold loose leaf tea by the name of Thomas Sullivan. Right. And he decided to send out samples of a, new tea that he was a new blend of tea that he was producing and he sent out the samples in these silk presentation bags and the people who received the silk presentation bags weren't really sure what to do with the silk presentation bags no in 1908 i see where this is going

and so they just put it straight into the boiling water that is mind-blowing what an accident so tea bags were an accident by accident crikey that just changes your entire world view, doesn't it? It does, yeah. And that's a thing, isn't it? I remember when I was a kid, we had a tea caddy screwed to the kitchen wall with loose leaf tea in it,

and you sort of pushed this button, and a little serving of loose leaf tea shot out of the chute directly into the teapot. How cool. And I was about to say, I can't remember the last time I used a teapot because it's all tea bags.

I actually can. There's a really nice place. near me where I had a pot of tea recently just out of the blue on the spur of the moment I don't don't know what I was thinking but I asked for a pot of tea and it was just lovely you know the tea came in this beautiful little pot there was a tea strainer that you hovered over the cup to catch the leaves yeah there were sugar tongs there was a little little saucer it was just you don't get that with a cup of coffee you know you just get a cup of coffee you drink it and then you're done tea is a process tea is a formality it's

I can understand why it's such a big thing in Chinese culture. It really is. It's a ceremony. There's a whole procedure to making a cup of tea, you know. Well, even though I don't drink tea, I do make tea for friends when they come round. Right. And I have loose leaf tea. Oh, do you?

I find that the clarity of the tea is much better when made with loose leaf tea. Was that right? So, yeah, it's like a purer, it's a purer colour. Yes. Okay. There's an expression which I love, which is, you know when you put leaf tea into a pot into boiling water and the leaves open up? Oh yes. That's called the agony of the leaves.

Oh my goodness. The unfurling of those leaves in hot water is called the agony of the leaves. Wow. That's pretty. Yeah. Now I've had, as we've just sort of mentioned, their sources, and the whole tea service, you know, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the. crockery that goes along with all of this. You know, when

high society started having their friends around for tea, it was such a showy thing, you know, like I said, the tea was expensive, the sugar was expensive. They imported the crockery from China. We didn't start making the stuff ourselves until the early 1700s, so everything about

it was expensive. They had lockable tea caddies. Oh, wow. Because the tea was so prized, the lady of the house would have a lockable tea caddy and carry a little key on a chain with her so that the staff or nosy friends couldn't nick the tea. And as I said earlier, they used to drink tea in bowls. You'd hold it between both hands until eventually they decided that was not elegant enough.

So the teacup was invented with its dainty little handle that you can pick up between finger and thumb. I notice you're showing me how to pick up a teacup there and you have your little finger sticking out. Oh, I do. Automatically, yes. It's not how I drink tea, but how I imagine tea should be drunk. Yes.

We talk about tea being very popular in the UK and how we've taken control of it. We're not the biggest drinker of tea. Oh, aren't we? No. Who is? The Americans. I beg your pudding. The Americans.

The Americans drink more tea than us. I shan't stand for it, Bruce. Apparently it's the third most popular drink in America after water and coffee. Right. However, it's not tea the way that you and I know it. Okay. It's iced tea. Oh, that suddenly makes more sense.

So Americans drink a lot of iced tea. It's about 85% of all American tea is iced. Right. How interesting. And guess how that was invented? By mistake? Yes. Hooray.

Tell me about iced tea then, Bruce. So it was basically somebody had some tea left over and stuck it in the fridge. and then took it out the fridge and said, actually this tastes rather nice and decided to make iced tea. That's brilliant. Apparently, a couple of years ago, 40 people in the UK were admitted to hospital

in tea cozy related injuries. Tea cozy, not even teapot related, tea cozy related. Tea cozy. So the little sort of knitted thing that you put over a teapot to keep the tea warm. Apparently, I don't know whether it was people trying to lift a teapot using the tea cozy

or whether it was, you know, getting the tea cozy stuck on their head or what sort of tea cozy injuries they were? I think it was probably mostly burns and boils. But 40 people in a year? 40 people in the UK in one year. That's preposterous. There's a Billy Connolly thing, wasn't there, which is he didn't trust anybody.

You could be left alone in a room with a tea cozy without trying it on. Yes, that's right. So chimps have been drinking tea in the UK since 1926. Have they? And they used to hold these tea parties at London Zoo. So they would basically dress the chimps up. They would give them cups of tea and then they would let them have a tea party. They would get cake.

Obviously, in those days, we didn't realize that cake was bad for chimps. So we'd actually give them proper cake, as opposed to, the sort of cake that a chimp would actually eat healthily. So, yes, so they started off with the chimp's tea party in my own. 1926 and and that actually continued through until I think I've even seen one I think it continued until about 1972 really and in 1956 one of the big tea manufacturers in the UK Brok Bond is the it's like Brooklyn was the name of the company and PG Chips was the name of the brand um started to use Chimp's tea parties in advertising yes

So we had, when commercial television started, you used to see Brookbourne PG-Tips commercials featuring chimps tea parties. And then after they did the chimps tea parties, they kind of took it even further. And they had like, you know, removal company. Yes, I remember that. Yeah. Dressed up in their dust jackets. Yes. Trying to get a piano down some stairs.

And then breaking for some tea. Now, that is all very interesting. I was only very, very vaguely aware of the phrase chimpanzees tea party. As soon as you said it, I thought that rings a bell, but I don't know why. I had never realised that chimps tea parties were such a thing before PG-Tibs. Yes. Someone of my generation, I only know the association between chimpanzees and tea because of PG-Tips. Yes.

I didn't realize they were building on something that was already there. Even though it started 30 years before. Hmm. Yeah. I had no idea. Carl, learned something every episode, don't you? You do? Well, we do. So chimps were used very much in the Brooklyn P.G. Tips commercials.

Do you remember the Tetley Tee folk? Oh, the little animated fellas in the white coats and the flat cabs? Yes. Yeah, I do. So when Tetley pretty much introduced tea bags into the UK, they were used as a kind of a way of going, There's 2,000 little perforations in every Tetley tea bag. That's right.

That let the flavour flood out. Specifically in a Yorkshire accent. Specifically by Brian Glover, who was the guy who did the voiceover for my Allensonson's commercial. Oh, I have always thought that. Bruce, I remember in my childhood thinking, Crikey, that Tetley tea fella sounds a lot like the Allensman's bread fella. Yeah, same guy. Well, how wonderful.

Tetley, the tea with an outtickin' out. And of course we can't talk about tea without talking about Lawrence Turrow. Can't we? I was quite happy to do so. Who's Lawrence Turow? Well, you ain't going to get him on no plane. Oh, Mr. T. Oh.

So Lawrence Turrow, actor. Yes. Played BA in the 18. Yes. was a professional wrestler and occasionally a boxer but mostly a wrestler. And loved kids. So a lot of the charity work that he did was all to do with children. So he did a lot of work with children.

He ensured that whenever he was in the A team and there were kids involved in the plot, it was always BA, who was the guy who was like the hero to the kids. Oh, okay, right. So yeah, so Lawrence Turrow, aka Mr. T. Mr. T. Wonderful. In the 1980s, Mr. T had a very brief pop music career. It consisted of one song called, Treat your mother right.

And there he is on stage with a little silver microphone saying, There is no other like mother, so treat her right. I remember this from my childhood and thinking how strange it was. But it's in keeping with what you've just said about him. you know, working for children's charities and being a lovely chap. Family values, all that stuff. Yeah. Jolly good.

A decent man, as they say. Yes. So are there any records associated with tea? There certainly are way too many to count. I can imagine, well, because it's the Guinness Book of Records which is British. I would imagine there would be a lot of British tea drinking or tea. Well, interestingly, there are actually more international records related to tea than there are British records. Perhaps we just take it for granted and we don't think.

think it's interesting enough to bother doing a record for. Well, I guess the Chinese and the Indians probably drink a lot more tea than we do. I expect so, yeah, yeah. These are just a few of the records I found. The fastest time to drink a mug of tea. 2.13 seconds. I couldn't find any data on how big the mug was or what temperature the tea was. That's what I would be asking is how hot the tea was because, yeah.

Totally different kettle of fish if it's lukewarm tea compared to fresh out of the pot. Totally different to it's a kettle of fish. Well, yes, that's true. It would be. But this record was achieved in 2023 by André Ortolf in Germany. The largest cup of tea ever contained 9,123 litres of tea. That's a swimming pool. Pretty much.

Yeah. This was in Mexico. Again, in 2023, seems to be quite a good year for tea-related records. The tea bag. that they put in this preposterously large cup of tea weighed 96 kilos. So what happened to the tea afterwards? I don't know. It didn't say. And then finally the record for the largest tea party was in India in 2008.

They had a party of 32,681 people in the city of Indoor. Wow. The tea in question that the tea party served was brewed by Brue. Bond that you already mentioned. The event was sponsored by the T-Bord of India, which I just think is lovely that that exists. Well, I've just noticed that my teapot's empty. Yes, I think I'm down to the dregs.

Thank you for coming along to our little tea party and learning with us. So before you go, we'd like you to do some things, please. Yes, we would. We'd like to tell us whether or not you'd like this episode by giving us a review on your podcast player please. Yes. And if you have some equally nerdy fact-loving friends, please tell them about factorily so that they can come and join in the fun. Yes. And I mentioned the show notes. Please do go to the show notes. There'll be linked to all sorts of interesting stuff. Absolutely. And then of course you can subscribe to factorily. If you hit the subscribe button

on your podcast player of choice, then every Thursday morning you'll get a notification that a brand new episode has landed. Marvelous. So thank you all very much for listening. please join us again next week for another fun-filled factual episode of factorily. Bye-bye. Ovoa.