Tea

SCIENCE WITH TEA

 Tea can be a handy tool for kitchen-table chemistry: strong tea, for example, can be used in a chemical assay for iron in fruit juices. Add about four tablespoons of the juice to be tested to a small glass about half full of strong tea. If a dark precipitate forms, the juice contains iron. (Iron combines with the tannins in tea to form insoluble iron tannate.)

	From Fizzics Education, see instructions at Use Tea to Detect Iron in Food. Better yet, see Vicki Cobb’s Chemically Active! (J.B. Lippincott, 1987), which has a clear explanation of the experiment and several extension activities. This excellent hands-on chemistry book is (WHY?) out of print, but is available from libraries and in inexpensive used editions.
	From NASA, Mystery in a Cup of Tea investigates the principles of fluid mixing with honey and a cup of tea – learn all about it, try an experiment of your own, and see how the astronauts drink tea in space.
	Use tea bags to make ancient-looking paper, suitable for papercrafts, journaling, or pirate treasure maps.
	Grow your own tea! For starter suggestions, see How to Make Herbal Teas which has instructions for tea-brewing and a plant list.

THE HISTORY OF TEA

	From the United Kingdom Tea Council, The History of Tea has an amazing amount of information, covering – among much else – the origin of tea, tea smuggling, the Boston Tea Party, the tea clippers, and the invention of the tea bag.
	Sarah Rose’s For All the Tea in China (Penguin Books, 2011) – subtitled “How England Stole the World’s Favorite Drink and Changed History” – is a daring tale of espionage in which master plant collector Robert Fortune disguised himself as a mandarin and set out to steal tea seedlings for the East India Company. For teenagers and adults.
	Tom Standage’s A History of the World in 6 Glasses (Walker Publishing Company, 2006) is a history of humankind from the Stone Age to the present, told through the medium of six essential beverages – beer, wine, spirits, coffee, cola, and tea. For teenagers and adults.