Aperture Science, Inc.

Sometimes I think about "Earl Grey, hot."

When TNG was airing, I wasn't drinking or ordering tea yet. Now that I do, I find myself having to make clarifications about tea that I wouldn't usually expect, like clarifying that I want a chai latte in the morning to be hot, even if it's summer. But I mostly think about it, because when I make tea for Psyche, she does not want it hot, just warm.

The electric kettle heats the water to a good steeping point, just below boiling, and after a few minutes that's where I expect it too be. It's probably too hot for my own good, but I still take a few sips, quickly, to get the first taste. Then as I work, and periodically forget it, it cools more and more, and my sips get larger and larger. If I get absorbed too much, and it reaches near room temperature, I usually just shotgun the remainder so I can make another cup.

Psyche will wait for the tea to cool down to warm before she starts drinking. And that can take a while. I've taken to steeping her tea a little short of ideal, then dropping some ice after removing the leaves, so that she can get a head start.

In Star Trek's future, I imagine that tea is replicated the way Psyche likes it. Imagine it brewed hot, but then already cooled down to a pleasant warmth, for easy drinking. By default, then Starfleet officers are picking up their cups of tea brewed several minutes before it was even desired.

Picard doesn't brew his own tea (where we regularly see him onscreen), but he clearly already has a history with tea that starts too hot to drink. Why else would anyone think to order their tea hotter than drinkable, in a time where pizza never burns the roof of your mouth either? It suggests some of the family history, that in his past, at least, he was party to the manual steeping of tea and still moves to its rhythms.