The Spread of Tea Culture in the West
So, I am curious to know when this recent surge of interest in tea, especially loose tea and what you’d call artisan teas, began.
I have only known of the niche in the West for this type of tea for a little over a year. When I was looking at some internet tea forums today that dated back to 2007 people were talking as if some of the concepts very well known of in the Western tea community today were very unheard of. Things like Gongfu style brewing and some of the other more delicate and ceremonial Asian styles of preparation were not well-known at all.
Has anyone been around to sort of witness and see when this new community knowledge and interest in tea started to unfold? I know the internet has opened up so much possibility for its grown in the west, but I wonder just how young the internet tea community is? Or the Western tea community in general in regard to non-bagged teas and less casual, more nuanced tea brewing?
I am an aged person, and in my blog and elsewhere I have written about how little there was when I was young. 40 years ago, I got myself good background in herbs. Back then, aside from Lipton one might be able to find a tin of Earl Gray packaged in England.
I also was introduced to Chai mixes at meditation centers. These 8 herb, 16 herb and 22 herb blends were made by Yogi tea. If you read the Yogi tea website, they refer to their early company history as making these bulk blends for meditation centers, and they didn’t have names except “8 herb” or whatever. They were made of roots, twigs and seeds primarily, and they needed to be boiled so we made batches. Yogi doesn’t make those blends anymore, I kind of miss them.In the 70s and 80s, natural food stores, hippie stores in the US carried a variety of bulk herbs, and things like Japanese kukicha twig tea started to appear. That was one of the first unusual teas I remember drinking, and it too has to be boiled.
The internet era has been a revelation for me. I tend to not relate to all the writing about “bad tea,” because to me this era now is a vast improvement from cutting plantain leaves out of the lawn to brew up. That is my perspective.
Thank you for sharing that perspective. I think you’re right too, “good tea” is not all about high attention to artisanship and quality standards. Drinking tea is an emotional experience as well as a culinary one, so there are many aspects that affect how we perceive tea. I think that it is wonderful that some of the more ceremonial or attentive methods of brewing are becoming more popular because it shows that there can be varying levels of focus, meditation, and care in preparing tea just as much as in drinking it.
And a lot of us younger folks are probably spoiled on the plethora of tea that is available to us to try with a few simple clicks of a mouse. It’s truly awesome that we’ve globalized in this way and can share culture so easily, but it doesn’t mean the nostalgia or simplicity of preparing a long well-known bagged tea from a supermarket should be any less enjoyed. I am not one to take loose teas with me to work. I’ll just drink from cheap tea bags in those situations, and I really allow myself to appreciate the nature of tea just as much in those times. It has the same calming effects for me. We are very lucky to be able to try teas so freely these days, and without even having to grow and pick the leaves ourselves.
It’s a hard one to answer but i’d also like to ask when peoples attitudes changed – in the UK loose tea was what old people drank or you had when you went out for afternoon tea but it’s slowly come back in vogue but it’s still way behind our demand for a good coffee.
What’s amazing is how I can buy so much tea online and find out so much about it that previously living somewhere like Manchester wouldn’t have been an option unless I got a book on tea from the library or went to somewhere like TeaCup. Now I can converse with people from around the world and fill my brain with tea related knowledge. Super
Tea has a strange history in the US, since it was once taxed by the British monarchy and fell out of popularity when Americans held the famed “Boston Tea Party” and began opting for coffee as a (at the time, viewed as patriotic) alternative. To that point coffee was not yet popular here, and I think it’s safe to say that coffee has retained much higher popularity in the US ever since. Over 200 years later, tea is only just making a more significant impression on Americans. Iced tea has always been somewhat popular here, especially in the South, but loose leaf teas were almost unheard of until the late 90s and early 00s, and even still you can’t find loose teas at most supermarkets (though the bagged tea sections at most grocers have gotten pretty extensive in the past 20 years or so). You usually have to go to specialty tea stores for loose tea, and there are very, very few. The only large chain is Teavana, which is a controversial one since most of their teas contain so much fruit pieces and other add-ins that they are practically steepable potpourri. Teavana’s flavored teas and tisane blends are popular among a certain crowd that likes to think they know more about good tea, but as that company is very adamant about pushing their own proprietary blends and not educating the market about tea in general, most people are still unaware about the large world of tea. It’s hard to find privately owned tea-shops as well, as most Americans equate tea with the typical Indian and African black teas that get made into tea bags for the mass market. Most Americans have no idea of the broad range of tea types and flavors and think that “Orange Pekoe” means the tea contains orange essence.
It is awesome we can now share information and purchase teas online. There’s no way I could have this passion for tea if we couldn’t. On the other hand, I hope tea kind of stays a niche market because the highest quality farms are pretty small scale and couldn’t possibly keep up with demand if our cultures suddenly decided overnight that everyone was a tea aficionado. The prices would skyrocket and pre-orders would become a frenzy. Thank goodness for us noble few weirdos who lurk the web constantly in search of a unique new tea fix. :P
It’s definitely a hard thing to track, maybe even more so here in the States, as there is a huge historical significance for why coffee became a more preferred beverage over tea. During the years when this country was still colonies tea was taxed by the British monarchy… and as anyone who has heard of the Boston Tea Party would know… Americans weren’t too fond of that and raised a pretty big stink. Coffee became viewed not just as an alternative beverage to tea but was viewed as a show of patriotism to drink it. You could say tea has been sort of a niche market in the US in the 200+ years since. Though iced tea has been particularly popular in the South for quite some time and has some interest in the rest of the nation, especially in summer months, you could say that loose tea and even a great percentage of the pre-bottled tea did not really come strongly onto the US market until the late 90s and early 00s. Bagged teas have always been available, growing in popularity toward the end of the 20th century, but have never even come close here to being as popular as coffee.
My last job was as a barista, and considering how fussy coffee is, expiring so soon after opening it or brewing it, it is kind of crazy to me that coffee is so popular rather than tea. The amount of coffee we wasted to keep fresh coffee brewed at the coffee bar was unreal.
Politics is mostly the reason for a lack of tea variety until recently. I think you will find after the Boston Tea Party, tea was still very popular among the wealthy – just not as much from the East India Company, which was the only source of legal tea for many years. Coffee became the drink of the common man because it was affordable. Moving forward, green tea was as popular as black tea even for southern sweet tea, until the trade with the east was interrupted by world war. So our tea switched to almost exclusive British controlled India and Ceylon black tea. The invention of tea bag changed tastes – a fast simple strong brew became preferred. Grocer shelves reflected this preference and Lipton made a fortune.
We owe Ruth Campbell Bigelow a huge thank you for offering us a choice. She started her empire on her kitchen table during the depression with Constant Comment. This was the first tea I remember buying on my own. The company introduced American grocery store buyers to Earl Grey, Lemon Lift, and Cinnamon Stick, in the mid 70’s.
The growth you see now came with the reopening of trade with China and the development of the internet. It has been slow going because mindset and tastebuds have been programmed to expect tea to taste like Lipton. It took a while for Starbucks (among others) to convince people coffee could be improved on from the store bought stuff they were percolating.
This is way over-simplified but hope it helps the conversation.
Thank you for an interesting discussion. Wanted to share this recent article about the rise of the tea economy in the US.
The popularity of green tea, in particular, has soared due to the wealth of research and studies supporting its numerous health benefits. Concurrently, an increased interest and appreciation for the different types of tea, availability of so many varieties from worldwide tea regions have all contributed to the growing “culinary” buzz around tea. Pretty exciting!
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