Full disclosure: I was a student at Cambridge (England, not the other Cambridge).
I noticed that, of all the other department tea rooms I went to, the tea pot in ChemEng dribbled the most. Is this done on purpose, to highlight that we as ChemEngs should not apply our skills indoors, but should go forth and find other tearooms to invade, and find something else to gripe about and inspire our collective juices?
For the non-ChemEngs, no drip teapots are sold here, and written about here and here.
The writer of the above article mentions that “tannin in the tea stains the surface of the inside of the teapot, this in effect in simple terms makes the surface smoother.” Now, a lot of money is spent offshore to increase the throughput of crude pipelines by reducing the amount of friction between the fluid and the pipe walls. A lower pressure drop means for a given arrival (anding) pressure, a given upstream pump can provide more flow (look up a typical pump flow-head diagram).
Is a tannin a miracle drag reducing agent?
Wata - Malaysian Oil and Gas Engineer 
Tannin….. isn’t that in red wines…. especially grape skin that gives it the distint colour and taste….
we should try to extract that.
Jabba hasn’t been to Cambridge, but was from a place called Exeter.
At my time, there were talk that someone left liquid mercury in the teapot (for lecturers of course). My advice is, don’t commit murder if you ain’t smart enough. Try bleach/rat poison instead. [Anyway, I’ll leave that story to another time]
Anyway, tannin in tea stains the surface of pots…. [Sounds very wise] How come tannin in red wine doesn’t stain on to the glass bottle? Jabba reckons tannin needs a rough surface to attach itself.
If one can reduce frictional loss through a magical coat…. you’re the next recipient of whatever medal those institution gives in their grand ballroom annually. This is similar to reducing resistivity in those electrical cables. Pressure loss and energy loss is a big thing.
There are talk that slime from slugs/snails also reduces friction factor too. [yummy….]
So can we pig the pipelines with grape-skin pigs filled with tea bags ? That way, we’ll clean the pipeline, line it with drag reducing agents and also colour it all a nice reddish brown.