Coffee now #1 in Britain, meanwhile the U.S. loves tea

[Jenise]

— Coffee's third wave has unseated tea as the beverage of choice for Great Britain. Per the BBC, for the last 40 years, weekly tea purchases have dropped by "two-thirds" from 2.4 ounces per household per week to 0.88 ounces. The colonies are to blame, of course. Meanwhile, the Atlantic notes that the U.S. market for tea has more than quadrupled during the past twenty years. Tea party, indeed.

We have 5x the population of the mother ship. Their tea is a drop in the bucket over here.

Before I became a retired bum my work used to take me to London about 5 - 6 times a year and I watched this happening. All of a sudden everyone wanted a latte during morning breaks, not a cuppa.

Heads up..... I also used to go regularly to Tokyo and saw the same thing starting to happen. French bakeries serving coffee were all over town. I doubt coffee will overtake tea there anytime soon but coffee's share was definately going way up, and this was quite some time ago. I wonder what it's like now.

Seem's were're buying more but we don't actually like it...

There is a remarkable idea that only a small proportion of people who drink coffee actually think it’s nice. A Mintel study (this was of coffee drinkers at home, but it wouldn’t be unreasonable to assume it’s a similar story for people who buy cups when they’re out) found that just 29% liked the flavour of ground coffee, and only 37% liked instant yet they still drank it. Of those who went to coffee shops, nearly half were more likely to go to chains that allowed them to customise their coffee. Flavoured syrups are popular: 35% of customers like having them added to bought coffee, but this rises to 57% among 16- to 24-year-olds. So we’re in the baffling situation where lots of us buy coffee, but it appears that not that many of us actually enjoy drinking it – the proper stuff, anyway

In this article about the rise of the conquering 20 spoonfuls of sugar containing Chai Latte http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle ... coffee-cup

[Jenise]

Peter, your article brings up several thoughts. One, that when I lived in England, at least in my area it was true that people either drank tea (with milk, GAG) or instant coffee, specifically Nescafe--people actually used the brand name. "Would you like tea or Nescafe?", they'd ask. That detail's important because of the methodology involved in making tea--EVERYBODY had an electric water kettle for tea making, but few had coffee makers (of course, the reverse was true in the U.S., still is). So instant coffee was the obvious tea alternative.

Another thought: when I was young I loved tea, hated coffee. But in the work place, a tea preference is a liability. Even if you want to go to all that fuss in your own cubicle, in meetings it's a messy little ritual. And tea tastes awful in a Styrofoam cup. That was my one and only motivation for learning to like coffee. It could be that your compatriots have had similar evolutions.

Maybe its answered in the report the article comes from, but sounds as if they're comparing weight of tea purchased vs weight of coffee purchased..

Tea is a lot lighter than coffee and a teabag or spoonful of tea can make several cups wheres it seems to take a lot of coffee to make one cup of espresso.