His tea-tinged taste buds are worth a cool million pounds

The noisier you slurp the tea, the better. This allows for more air to enter the mouth which then oxygenates the tea and produces the full flavours. — AZLINA ABDULLAH/The Star

Sebastian Michaelis is a professional tea taster. So valuable are his taste buds to the British tea brand Tetley, that the company has insured his tongue for £1mil (RM5.7mil).

“The insurance is a reflection of the investment that Tetley has put into me. Really, it is less about my tongue and more about the years of training and the difficulty to find someone who can taste tea,” says the 34-year-old Brit who was in Kuala Lumpur recently.