Lost Tea Part Two: "Enter 77"
Brief Recap: On "Lost," the television show about survivors of a plane crash living on a mysterious island, there lives a mysterious one-eyed man. In this week's episode, "Enter 77," we discover his name: Mikhail Bakunin (Andrew Divoff). (Warning: slight spoilers for this episode follow)
In Wednesday night's episode, he serves iced tea to Kate (Evangeline Lilly) and Sayid (Naveen Andrews), informing them that he had grown the tea himself. In yesterday's post, I mentioned that this would be labor intensive. Let's assume the iced tea was black tea, since that would be most traditional. However, because of the pale color of the liquor, it could also have been green or oolong.
Mikhail would first have to grow the plants, either from seeds or cuttings. Usually in the commercial sphere, leaves are not plucked until the plant is several years old, but since the tea is for his personal use (or perhaps the Others') we'll say that he could harvest sooner. Now that he has his leaves, what next?
He must first lay out the leaves so that any surface moisture will escape. Then the leaves must be lightly broken, and the process repeated until all the moisture is gone. To prevent further fermentation and decomposition, the tea must be fired. Mikhail could do this in his oven. Usually the leaves are then cut, large cuts to be used for loose leaf tea while smaller bits would go into teabags.
Considering that Mikhail is enough of a tea aficionado to grow his own tea, I can only assume that he would want to process it correctly. Or maybe he just lays the leaves out to dry or uses fresh leaves. Like the numbers, this is yet another "Lost" mystery that may never be solved.
(I do think it is a safe guess that 4 8 15 16 23 42 are not his steeping times)
Click here to watch "Enter 77"
