In Hot Water

To his many fans, Captain Jean-Luc Picard of the starship Enterprise embodies the best qualities of twentieth-century humanity projected onto a twenty-fourth-century future. As our representative to other species in the galaxy, he is moral, dignified, compassionate, intelligent, and cultured, all of which is symbolized by his beverage of choice: “Tea. Earl Grey. Hot.” Although the captain grew up in a French vineyard, in the Star Trek universe only the bellicose Klingons drain vat after vat of blood wine.

Picard’s favourite tea, and mine, is named after Charles Grey, the British prime minister from November 1830 to July 1834. A popular legend holds that Earl Grey tea was created by a Chinese official whose son had been saved from drowning by one of the peer’s men, but since Grey never set foot in China, this is unlikely. An alternative and more probable origin story is...