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Satisfying Restaurant-table Science

This is a part of a conversation I had with a friend a few days ago:

Okay. So, last night with Eric at Perkins, I ordered tea with lemon as my meal. I dipped the teabag into the hot water, and the water turned a smooth and silky green, ever deepening into a nice toasty forest hue. Normal, right?

Well, then I added a squeeze of lemon. Suddenly the tea turned fiery purple! Rich grilled fuchsia! Dark hot pink!

We stared at this mysterious mug of chameleon chamomile and hibiscus broth. Maybe the acid in the lemon did something to the chlorophyll to break it down, such that the underlying anthocyanin pigments were able to flood forthwith?

Then I remembered that cabbage is a natural litmus solution... cabbage water changes colors in response to pH level. So maybe this tea was doing that, too.

How do we test this hypothesis, though? We need a source of alkaline to counteract the acid in the tea and see if it turns back to green. Where do we find alkaline solutions in Perkins? At this hour? We asked the waitress if she could get us any baking soda. She claimed no, that lying fop.

I suddenly remembered that in the old days the pioneers used to make soap by filtering water through wood ash to make caustic lye, and then mixing that with animal fat. Caustic lye... that's about as alkaline as you can get. Water and ash!

So I lurked over to the smoking section and asked a fine young couple if I could have their cigarette ash. They gave me the look you can imagine they gave me, but agreed.

Back at the table, I mixed water with the ash and then mixed in some pink tea. It turned green! Cloudy and ashy, but green!

Just to make sure that it wasn't simply a factor of the ash itself causing some careless and hideous illusion of green, I added a squeeze of lemon juice to the gagging green slurry... and it turned pink again! More ash... green again! Litmus!

I have to tell you, that was some of the most satisfying restaurant-table science I've ever experienced.

It had everything I love about science. Weird observation. Hypothesis. Problem solving. Resourcefulness. Testing the hypothesis. repeating the experiment. Eliminating doubt.

We also experimented developing a napkin filtration system so that next time we can extract a less cloudy solution. But then we decided that we'll just ask for a coffee filter instead.

I say that the waitress was a lying fop because 1. that's funny to say that about her, and 2., we found out later that Perkins has a box of baking soda in their freezer, for odor control.

But, actually, I'm GLAD they didn't have any baking soda. As that forced having to come up with the ash solution. Solution!

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