Synthetic food replicators in science fiction (and real life) can vary a ton. They might create anything imaginable, or just spit out soylent green; they might function perfectly, or constantly fall apart. But everyone wants just one thing out of them: tea.

The entirety of Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series is the masterpiece of a sci-fi satire artist, but the franchise features one particularly memorable moment: when Arthur Dent locates the Nutri-Matic Drinks Dispenser and places a simple, if predictably English, request.

From Hitchhiker’s Guide:

He had found a Nutri-Matic machine, which had provided him with a plastic cup filled with a liquid that was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea. The way it functioned was very interesting. When the Drink button was pressed, it made an instant but highly detailed examination of the subject’s taste buds, a spectroscopic analysis of the subject’s metabolism, and then sent tiny experimental signals down the neural pathways to the taste centers of the subject’s brain to see what was likely to go down well. However, no one knew quiet why it did this, because it invariably delivered a cupful of liquid that was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea. The Nutri-Matic was designed and manufactured by the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation, whose complaint department now covers all the major landmasses of the first three planets in the Sirius Tau Star system.

Arthur’s quest gets him into an argument with the various automated processes on the spaceship, from ventilation shafts to the floor. In the next book, the processing power needed to produce tea turns into a plot point, keeping the ship’s improbability-powered drive from letting Arthur and co. escape from a sticky situation. But at least it finally makes a cup of amazing tea, putting the story at the top of the pantheon of tea machine-related fiction.

Like most things written by Douglas Adams, the Nutri-Matic was parodying a commonly accepted trope—in this case, the synthetic food creator. Parodies need something to parody, after all, and when Hitchhiker’s Guide came out in the late ’70s and early ’80s, the simplistic atomic-age retrofuturism of earlier decades was a prime target.

Seemingly magical machines like the Frigidaire Kitchen of the Future were promised in the 1950s, to little result. Even earlier references to synthetic food appeared in John Campbell’s 1930s story Twilight, which imagined a future in which an automated restaurant’s food that may well be “three hundred thousand years old” is served by impartial machines that “made things synthetically, you see, and perfectly.”

Making things perfectly is, of course, exactly the sort of thing that Adams’ inventions almost, but not quite, never do.

A more straightforward use of the futuristic tea machine was yet to come, in one of popular sci-fi’s most optimistic franchise. Star Trek: The Next Generation starred Jean-Luc Picard, with the statement “Tea, Earl Grey, hot,” in a close supporting role. Trek’s replicator, capable of producing anything out of thin air and ending world hunger, also made a lot of tea.

Far-future tea obsessions continued in Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice. The drink, key to a civilized Radchaai society, is a direct homage to the vast importance of tea in C.J. Cherryh’s Foreigner space opera series. A tea ceremony even made it on the cover of Cherryh’s latest novel, Tracker, and Leckie has released a trio of Ancillary-themed tea blends.

The quest for tea-centric technology isn’t just the stuff of fiction. Real life has seen multiple tea robots: Teaforia’s streamlined model is an attempt to solve the ever-present problem of how to home-brew a loose leaf tea while managing to appropriately corral “more than 200 chemical compounds” into the perfect beverage. Meanwhile, teaBOT is the commercial alternative, designed to cut down on long lines in shops by offering customers an array of tea options, similar to an upscale automated soft drink dispenser. TeaBOTis backed by Y Combinator, which bankrolls the best Silicon Valley startups.

Critics complain that tea drinking is about the ritual of preparation as much as it is about the taste. I’m just grateful that none of these robots are stalling spaceships to prepare a cup of soylent green tea.