When human beings first encountered the drinks machine, they expected a machine that could produce a decent cup of tea. After all, those machines claimed to be able to produce tea, coffee and something called Hot Chocolate in a manner suitable for people in urgent need of decent brew. The machines produce a plastic cup containing liquids that are almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.

The Anatomy of a Beverage

To an Earth man, tea is simple. It involves:

  • Dry leaves of the Camellia sinensis plant.
  • Water, heated to exactly 100 degrees Celsius (or slightly below, depending on how fussy you are about your green leaves).
  • A vessel (preferably porcelain, though a chipped mug will do in a pinch).
  • A short period of quiet, civil contemplation while the leaves brew.

To the lowly drinks machine, however, this concept is completely incomprehensible. When we tried to explain what tea should be, the machine’s central processing unit had to call upon all of its processing power to compute the request. I suspect it may be summoning energy from an interstellar source.

The resulting beverage is so void of taste it makes our entire processing systems go offline, the artificial flavour fluctuating between “pale water” and “rocket fuel,” and our main taste receptors spending an inordinate amount of time trying to understand why what they were just subjected to bore almost no similarity to brewed leaves in a bag.

The Galactic Consensus

Across the wider galaxy, tea is regarded with a mixture of polite bewilderment and outright suspicion.

It is a little-known fact that The Martians drink something called infused Liquified cordial, which has the effect of both warming your innards and coating your gums at the same time. Compared to that, a warm infusion of herbs seems rather… domestic.

Yet, as humans have yet to fully discover, when you are hurtling through the infinite void of space in a spaceship without a working kettle, the tea from a drinks machine reminds us that there is nothing quite like a hot beverage.

Even if it does taste suspiciously like photocopier fluid.