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?
Posted by Wata 
Wata - Malaysian Oil and Gas Engineer 