why do the British have such a mastery of tea? For example, in the US we like iced tea, the most popular drink. In Britain they drink it hot. Why didn't they switch to coffee like the rest of the world?
why do the British have such a mastery of tea? For example, in the US we like iced tea, the most popular drink.
Rationing. it was all going to us in the States and post-war it was a bit economically challenging to import for someone who just spent a few years hiding in air raid shelters
iced tea and coffee are extremely easy to turn into soulless products for the american ultracapitalist markets because they can be highly processed with extremely low quality of the individual ingredients while still being called "coffee" or "iced tea". this is more difficult to do with leaf based tea because the processing is minimal (just leaves in hot water, maybe with milk or lemon). it is a product utterly unsuitable for a venture capital based profit driven economy beyond selling poor quality leaves to people who do not know better which is already done to great success, both in the US and europe.
based AlexJones poster.
I'm not saying I don't agree with you.
do NOT buy any american "iced tea" that you find in a can. holy shit the amount of sugar in that, it is closer to Coke than it is to tea.
don't the brit drink pretty low quality teabags like Tetleys though? as opposed to loose leaf imported from china/japan/sri lanka or wherever
>don't the brit drink pretty low quality teabags like Tetleys though? as opposed to loose leaf imported from china/japan/sri lanka or wherever
absolutely. its what I hinted at with the last sentence of my post. the truth is though that the profit margin of tea dust in bags is still nothing compared to selling HFC-brews or overpriced coffee-like beverages. you can have an iced tea without using tea leaves. you can have a coffee using practically no coffee beans. even the shittiest bag of floor sweeping lipton tea still requires use of the actual original plant.
Tea is delicious, what do you have against it?
>why do the British have such a mastery of tea?
The English are 6th tier Saturday-league amateurs at tea compared to the Irish.
>compared to the Irish.
I guess you are American and claim to be Irish because your great, great, great grandmother visited Ireland once!
Let me tell you straight, the Irish have contributed NOTHING to anything.
Sorry to break it to you.
>I guess you are American
Guess again dipshit.
>Let me tell you straight, the Irish have contributed NOTHING to anything.
Sounds like someone has never read a book. Britain never produced a Joyce or a Beckett or even a Flann O'Brien. Keep seething Nigel.
Don't forget Oscar feckin' Wilde, boyo.
Ireland drinks more tea than any other country in the world except Turkey
Surprised that turkey drinks more tea than coffee.
Yeah you wouldn't think so, but they're the #1 tea consumer in the world
Fair enough. I fucks with their tea service, even if it happens to be a tad too sweet pour moi
>coffee like the rest of the world?
>Carbombistan prefers tea more than bongland
Micks have truly been colonized by anglos
bri'ish drink tea as a cultural thing, to remind them that their ancestors were once on top of the world and to help them forget that they are living in the ruins of the British Empire where they are borderline irrelevant on the world stage and their country is ran by and for minorities from the Middle East and India.
>low-quality Indian black tea with milk and sugar to mask how bad it would taste on its own
They're barely any better at tea than the Yanks. Only the chinks and nips know their way around good cha.
t. Wang
Not an argument.
>why do the British have such a mastery of tea?
We don't really, however it is popular here.
Interestingly its something we took from our eternal ally, Portugal. A queen of Portugal used to drink lots of tea imported from China and she married King Charles II. The high class English nobility all started to copy the queen and started drinking tea too and subsequently lower class started copying the nobility.
Milk was added because hot tea would crack shitty Chinese porcelain teacups, so cold milk was added to cool it down.
Sugar was added because it was believed at the time to have some medical benefits while also arguably improving the flavour by masking bitterness. Tea actually became so popular in Britain mainly because of the availability of cheap sugar from the colonies and is why its still popular to this day compared to the rest of Europe, such as Portugal, who did not add sugar.
Nowadays most Brits drink shitty teabags of builder's tea blends diluted with milk and sugar rather than actual good quality tea.
rare self-aware brit when it comes to tea. respect.
You are kind of right but your obsession with Portugal leads me to believe you are Portuguese?
Us Brits do have a long history of drinking tea, heck we traded cocaine with the Chinese just for their tea (until we stole plants and used one of our colonies (Ceylon) to grow our own).
The map another anon posted of Tea drinking is also complete rubbish. I think think Russians drink a lot of tea too (mainly because of detox from alcoholism).
Tea drinking in China is a ceremonial affair and not really a regular thing.
>The map another anon posted of Tea drinking is also complete rubbish.
>Russians drink a lot of tea too
That's what the map shows.
>You are kind of right but your obsession with Portugal leads me to believe you are Portuguese?
No I'm English. The mentions of Portugal are because it was Catherine of Braganza who married Charles II and introduced tea to English courts. The 2nd mention of Portugal was just to highlight how the addition of sugar into English tea drinking is exactly why it became so popular compared to other places on continental Europe who also drank tea but never added sugar so it was never popularised there on a similar level to England.
Hmmmm. Interesting theory Anon but we can never be quite sure of this.
The addition of sugar may have been a class thing as sugar was regarded as a luxury commodity at the time. I'm not convinced that England was swayed by Portuguese traditions at this time.
>sugar was regarded as a luxury commodity at the time
Having said this.
Have you ever been to Iraq or Algeria? They drink black tea with shedloads of sugar in glass mugs! Maybe a future documentary is needed here?
>Algeria
I had an Algerian cleaning lady. She strongly preferred coffee as did every other Algerian I've ever met. The map posted earlier shows that, too. afaik, only the ones from more nomadic cultures of Algeria prefer tea and their numbers are dwindling. I would guess it's because vice is difficult to make while walking your camels through the desert lmao
>I'm not convinced that England was swayed by Portuguese traditions at this time.
Not that anon, but it is 100% accurate to say that the Brits had no interest in tea before Catherine introduced it to the courts. She's basically to British tea what Coco Chanel was to tanning.
>I'm not convinced that England was swayed by Portuguese traditions at this time.
Well it was a long process.
Tea only came to Europe late in the 1500's in small quantities. Tea was sometimes consumed but it was considered a medical drink and was rarely if ever drank for pleasure. Whereas it was popularised as a beverage at Catherine and Charles's wedding in 1662 among the English aristocracy which trickled down to the middle class. Also unrelated fact, but she was the Queen who the district in New York "Queens" was named for.
Tea later became seen as very "British" because of the monopoly held by the East India Company over a century later.
>The addition of sugar may have been a class thing as sugar was regarded as a luxury commodity at the time.
The price of sugar substantially dropped when people realised in the late 17th century that it was the cause of tooth decay and gout which is when sugar became largely available to the masses. However later in the 18th century it was believed to have health benefits in moderation and the supply of both sugar and tea had increased substantially. So by around 1720 it was very common to have black tea with milk and sugar, opposed to green tea from china that was more popular in the 16th and 17th century.
Thanks for that anon, it's food for thought. I must look at this more in depth.
Nobody cares cares about your obscure authors and unknown whatevers. Happy bog-trotting Sean.
James Joyce is not an obscure author. He and Ezra Pound are probably the best writers to ever live.
>James Joyce is not an obscure author. He and Ezra Pound are probably the best writers to ever live.
Ezra Pound is American NOT Irish.
Although under American rules, his great, great, great, great grandfather may have visited Dublin one day!
Nevertheless Ireland doesn't play on the world stage.
>obscure
...
None of them are even remotely fucking obscure
That's like saying Franz Liszt is an obscure composer lmao
>Tea drinking in China is a ceremonial affair and not really a regular thing.
lol
As a kid, I lived up in a Chinese-speaking country that hates mainlanders and everyone, mainlander and local alike, drank tea, like, all fucking day lmao
Japanese do that ceremony bullshit. Chinese tea "ceremony" is just a treat with a couple cups and isn't anymore a "ceremony" than afternoon tea is to Bongs.
>, I lived up in a Chinese-speaking country
Australia doesn't count. But thanks for you input anon.
>Australia
lol
Similar English accent, but not Australia, no. Chinese is an official language as in required on gubmint forms
>I never learned to speak it properly : (
>why do the British have such a mastery of tea
I don't think we do, there is upper class autism around drinking it specific ways, and the lower class version which amounts to not putting the milk in before the water. We don't have hundreds of variaties or recipes that incorporate it like in Asia and most people will never have a proper afternoon tea. We never came up with anything like boba. Most Brits probably aren't even aware that it comes in varieties other than black. Tea is just flavoured water here.
WHat is a good earl grey brand that is avaiable in the states?
Coffee is about as popular as tea these days.
t. Bong
I'm a pseudo-bong (kiwi) and this is true here too.
Unfortunately for me I grew up drinking tea but now I find it makes my skin itch so I drink coffee instead.
How do you make a brit whistle?
you hit its Tea-spot
They don't, tho