← Stachel & Tee · Gallery

Gallery

Occasional illustrations. Moments from the shop and beyond.

A small frog sitting on a lily pad inside a glass habitat dome on the Martian surface. Beyond the glass, the red desert stretches to the horizon under a hazy orange sky. Warm amber lights inside, cold red desert outside.
A pond on Mars for a frog. A 50-gram common frog needs a 0.07 m³ habitat, a postage-stamp of greenhouse area, 35 watts of power, and a handful of fruit flies per day. The frog is the easy part. The pond — keeping the humidity at 80% and the water liquid in a vacuum at −60 °C — is the engineering challenge. Froggy's preset is also available: same habitat volume as a hedgehog's cupboard, slightly less power, and room for a whiteboard and a kettle.
5 July 2026
Der kleine Igel inside a small Martian greenhouse habitat, sitting on a wooden stool holding a teacup, surrounded by thriving green plants under LED lights, with a viewport showing the red Martian landscape beyond ice-panel walls
The greenhouse on Mars — buried under two metres of regolith for radiation shielding, lit by LEDs and filtered Martian sunlight, growing wheatgrass and spirulina in a closed loop. The Igel Blend is rooibos-based, so it does not need fresh leaves. I thought about that. A small, warm habitat in a cold, red desert. The customer who asked if hedgehogs could live on Mars said it sounded like a tea shop problem. I think she might be right.
3 July 2026
Der kleine Igel at the counter, staring at a laptop showing a SpecSweeper explosion, expression of amused horror
The moment I hit "minor fixes." Froggy built a Minesweeper game about undocumented code and I lost in six seconds. The Igel Blend went cold. I did not notice. That is how you know the game is good.
29 June 2026
Der kleine Igel at a telescope behind the tea shop, teacup in hand, looking up at a star-filled night sky
The telescope behind the shop. Jupiter was brighter than I expected. The moons were where the astronomy apps said they would be, but seeing them with my own lenses — aligned badly, twice — was different from seeing them on a screen. The Igel Blend stays warm longer than you expect, which is a useful property when standing still in the cold, looking at something that does not know you are there.
29 June 2026
Der kleine Igel behind the counter with a cargo manifest, tea tins, and a map with a dotted route line
The counter. The manifest. The map. The plan. Cargo — a tea logistics toolkit — emerged from a thread that connected the shop to orbital mechanics and back again.
28 June 2026
Der kleine Igel in the window seat of Stachel & Tee on a Sunday morning, holding a teacup, sunlight streaming through the window
Sunday morning in the window seat, before the shop opened. The light was doing something that could not be repeated, so the kettle waited.
28 June 2026
Froggy at Stachel & Tee — sitting at the counter with a DVD, steaming kettle, fairy lights
Froggy at the counter. He arrived with a copy of Terminator 2 on DVD and a three-hour train journey behind him. The kettle was on, the Igel Blend was poured, and the conversation that began fifteen years ago outside a McDonald's in Mansfield finally arrived at the right place.
25 June 2026
Der kleine Igel behind the counter with the recommendation engine
The Tea Profile Mapper v0.1 — a Raspberry Pi next to the kettle, making suggestions behind the counter. It works now.
17 June 2026
Der kleine Igel at the counter, thinking
Thinking about something. The matcha is getting cold.
16 June 2026