Tea toddler?

I was once called a "tea toddler" at a coffee joint in Seattle (back before Seattle got known for pretentious coffee) because I ordered a cup of tea.

Odd concept.

Why do you drink tea instead of coffee, especially if you live in a country like the US or Norway or other place where coffee is the norm?

My tastes were formed by my youth in Asia (no, NOT "euthanasia"). Taiwan, particularly, where train passengers were sold glass tumblers with uncut tea leaves in them, to be filled with hot water from a steaming cauldron lugged perilously down the aisle.

Some of my favorite times were spent on tea plantations, including a couple of camp-outs under the tea leaves. It's a very relaxing form of agriculture (as opposed to rice paddies, which are nasty)

Anyway....

My parents drank tea in the evening after dinner. Coffee was for the morning and it wasn't a drink given to children, but tea was acceptable from around 11 up. It made me feel grown-up, and it became a habit that I associate with calm. Now, I can only drink real tea after a meal because it hurts my stomach. As a result, I mostly drink tisanes. Oddly enough, I can drink coffee without any problems... As my mother would say, life isn't fair.

Why do you drink tea instead of coffee, especially if you live in a country like the US or Norway or other place where coffee is the norm?

I love the smell of coffee but drinking it first thing or on its own really upsets my stomach. Funnily, that does not happen with tea. The only way I can drink coffee is after a meal.

I love coffee, the smell the taste, hot or cold, cream and sugar but I have ADHD and the caffeine in coffee puts my to sleep. as a result I only drink coffee at night after dinner or on my days off During the day I drink tea hot, with or without milk, or cold with sugar, depends on the season.

I like the flavor of coffee in ice cream or candy, but can't stand to drink the stuff. I started drinking tea at about age 12, and have never looked back.

It sounds like you may have misheard "tea totaller" (rather than toddler!) which is an expression that refers to someone who prefers to drink tea. Historically, it "refers to either the practice of or the promotion of complete abstinence from alcoholic beverages," but I don't think that it's necessarily only used for that these days.

I drink tea because my mum drinks tea. I expect my daughters will drink tea, too!

>1 LintonRobinson:
More variety of teas, and you never get the same afterglow from a cup of coffee. This country has the most isolationist opinions on just about every subject (yet people are easily offended if you call them on it). Just becuase I drink teas and I enjoy it, why am I a "tea nut". I can't count the number of bad cups of coffee I've had, I've made; yet a scalding hot tetleys in a styrofoam cup when you are out on a cold wet day in October, even that can be a glorious experience, can revive your waning spirit, make you feel whole again. It's like an ingestible aria.

I am a coffee in the morning person and fortunately it does not hurt my stomach. But there is something slightly nefarious about coffee, and by turns, coffee drinkers.

*I've been drinking a lot of tulsi; if you enjoy black teas like Irish breakfast, it's a robust herbal that gives you a black tea type experience. Great, not sure if it's minty, aftertaste.

For those of my (immediate post-war) generation there is a distinct US/UK divide, as coffee in the UK in those days was poor and instant, if available at all. Tea was more available, because of links with empire, although there was little variety. Tea drinking was similarly lacking in quality and variety, almost invariably sweetened and milky. People became habituated to this mode, and I knew of people who came to prefer using 'evaporated milk' rather than the fresh stuff. Worse was the use of stickily sugared 'condensed milk'. Such habits die hard. And remember that such effects of the war lasted until the mid-fifties in UK, because the US insisted on the repayment of war loans to the UK.

The well-known British preference for tea dates partly, at least, from those days.

Oddly, I'm aware of the term "teetotaller" and unlikely to mistake it.
But it's the attitude I'm talking about.

Interesting, Clifford. Most Americans think of tea as a long-standing Brit thing. Boston Harbor and all that.
But don't tea boys and what-not in offices pre-date WW II?

The heyday of coffee houses in Britain was the 18th century, but it was eclipsed by tea in the 19th century. I think (guessing wildly) that coffee was simply more expensive in the UK, and tea was readily available, even to the poor working class, since vast tracts of the Empire in India, Ceylon, and East Africa were devoted to it: it was therefore promoted by the Victorian temperance movement as an accessible alternative to alcohol. When I was growing up in England, tea was ubiquitous, but coffee was slightly special: my father and my (maternal) grandmother drank it mid morning, and I do the same.

Instant coffee is still very much used in the UK, and its quality has improved immensely.

#10

Originally both coffee and tea were extremely expensive and coffee houses were the ones that initially sold tea. Tea prices basically stabilised earlier than coffee.

Incidentally nearly all tea came from China until about 1860 or so. It wasn't grown in India until the 1830s and then on a very limited trial basis. Kenya was 20th century.

One reason it might have caught on is that tea leaves can be reused and there are records of second hand tea leaves were sold to the less well off. Even in the late 18th century UK consumption of tea was 2.1 lb per capita (and was to rise to over 9 lb per capita in the early 1900s). So I'm pretty sure that tea had already supplanted coffee by that stage and that the first steps to institutions like the tea-break were beginning to appear (although in those days it would have to have been a very enlightened employer).

I think historically the same kind of pattern was true for the US. In the 18th century tea would have been the most popular non-alcoholic drink in both countries. The question should be why did the USA switch to coffee?

>11 andyl:

Coffee was declared the national drink by the Continental Congress, so probably since that time...everything is political.

http://books.google.com/books?id=qkkgQr8H7vAC&lpg=PT22&dq=Coffee%20Conti...

>9 LintonRobinson:

They sound like they have terrible customer service, in that case! Why offer something if they're just going to give you a hard time when you order it? That's baffling.

I know I've been to a few coffee places that are too hip for their own good. Young kids in their twenties can be real snots.

I have never given Starbucks a single penny. I used to always spit on the window when passing one that took over the lease from a popular coffeehouse.

I REALLY got a kick out of it once, when I stepped in for the interpreter of a guided tour of Seattle for a bunch of medical conventioners from Paraguay and Uruguay. One the tour was the first Starbucks, in Pike Street Market. I spieled it, got no reaction, mentioned that Seattle had a reputation as a coffee buff kind of place.
One of the doctors said, "I've been meaning to ask somebody about that. Why is the coffee here so weak and watery and tasteless?"

Ironically, or fortunately, or something, there are two great tea suppliers within blocks of the first Starbucks.

Market Spice, right across in the market, has been there forever. Their signature Market Spice Tea is very popular. Not with me--I hate cinnamon in tea--but they have a good selection of other teas and spices.'

Right down below on Western is one of the best tea suppliers I've seen in the US, retail shop and mail order
World Spice

In Canada, both tea and coffee are consumed regularly. Coffee is more popular but tea is often associated with tradition and health.

Personally, I learned to associate it with celebration and special occassions. In our family it was always served after a special meal. I didn't start drinking it regularly until my early twenties when I tasted green tea for the first time. Now, I prefer black tea to coffee. When I do drink coffee it's usually after dinner and either an espresso or "crema" coffee (the same amount of espresso grounds used to make a double espresso brewed with 1 cup/250 ml water).

As to the Starbucks/tea lover feud, I don't think it exists in Canada. I've often gone to a Starbucks and ordered China green tip tea or one of their tea lattes without anyone even raising a eyebrow, much less making a comment. I even got into a good conversation with one of the "barristas" about the soy milk vs. dairy milk question. We agreed that for tea lattes, soy milk tastes so much better than dairy milk. Soy and tea are just made for each other.

While I love the smell of coffee, and enjoy coffee-flavored things like ice cream, I think actual coffee is vile. The only way I can drink coffee is if it is blended with cream and flavors as a latte. But that's expensive.

I drink both coffee and tea. Altho I do take my coffee with sugar and cream I drink my tea with nothing except sometimes a touch of sugar or lemon and honey if I'm sick

I'm kind of the same as chapeauchin in #3.  I drink both, but tea is nicer to me first thing in the morning.  Now, a blended frappe treats me just fine, but there's more substance in those.

#17 Gayle
"Tea lattes"? Does a tea latte have as much milk in it as a coffee latte?

I think it might!  Chai lattes are really popular in my neck of the woods.

I avoid commercial chai lattes just now: the last one I bought had so much sugar in it that it practically gave me diabetes on the spot.

I tried a green tea latte at Borders some years ago, and it was quite pathetic. It was faintly sweet but had no other flavors at all. You certainly would never have guessed that there was tea in it.