When tea was first introduced in Europe, it was sold in apothecaries as a remedy. Because tea was marketed as medicinal, doctors were the first people to have official reactions, either for or against tea. "Doctors wrote treatises explaining why tea was good for you or why it was dangerous. They are interesting. Some of these treatises are still preserved in libraries," Beatrice Hohenegger, author of Liquid Jade: The Story of Tea from East to West, recounts.

Tea was at first an object of curiosity, and because of its price, it was available only to the more affluent classes. Tea became an object of mass consumption thanks to something that happened in the mid-1600 in England. "In Oxford, in 1650, the first coffeehouse opened. It probably got its name from the fact that coffee was first served in those establishments. Many coffeehouses then began to open in London. It was a very busy city and all sorts of people would stop by the coffeehouse and have some coffee or tea."

Hohenegger reminds us that at that time, coffee and tea were a novelty. "Tea, coffee and chocolate arrived from Africa, the New World and Asia at more or less the same time in Europe. These were all very new things. We take it for granted that we can have tea, coffee or cocoa in the morning, but before they were discovered in Europe, people drank beer at breakfast."

An alternative to beer

Having beer for breakfast might sound like a novel idea today, and while some might be tempted to try it, the effect of drinking even "small" beer, so-called because it had a lower alcohol content, did have an effect on the people.

"Some scholars ponder the possibility that tea may have been connected with the beginning of the Industrial Revolution," Hohenegger says. "Imagine having a population that's hung over most of the day, or in any case not very functional, to having a population that is sober, alert, willing to work and capable of being in a factory for ten hours."

Beatrice Hohenegger has been researching tea culture and history for the past eight years. (Image: John Livzey, reprinted by permission)

The growing alcohol problem in England, which was approaching the status of a national emergency, was compounded by the introduction of cheap gin from Holland. "An answer to this problem was the temperance movement, and tea was its movement of choice. All of a sudden, there were temperance meetings being held all over England, and later on also in the United States. People were drinking huge amounts of tea, which meant good business for the East India Company.

Tea spies, anyone?

Because the East India Company had a monopoly on tea, they could dictate both the price and control the supply of this commodity. "Tea smuggling flourished. It's hard to believe that this simple, healthful drink was once a smuggling item. But huge amounts of smuggled tea were being consumed in England in the 1700s."

Ironically, it was another factor that helped make tea available to the general public.

For a long time, the whole world believed that tea grew only in China. "The British and the Dutch tried to sort of steal the secret of tea production and cultivation from China, and they brought in 'tea spies.' The Dutch managed to steal some plants and they brought them to Java, where they had their own tea plantations."

At around the same time, several people who were exploring Northern India saw a plant that they thought was the tea plant. They sent reports to the East India Company, who ignored the report because they were making good money from their monopoly on Chinese tea.

"When they realized that they were going to lose their monopoly, the East India Company began listening to these reports about tea plants growing in India. A man named Captain Bruce was given a tea plant by a grateful chief in Upper Assam in what is now northeastern India. They started building plantations in India, which is how Indian tea got started."

All from the same plant

"When you walk into a tea shop today, you see hundreds of different kinds of teas, and you wonder how many plants, how many varieties they have come from. They actually just come from one plant, the Camellia sinenis," Hohenegger points out.

Sinensis is a Latin word meaning "Chinese." The plant has two varieties, variety sinensis, which refers to tea plants grown in China, and variety assamica, which is from India. "The Chinese plant is hardier and works best in high altitudes whereas the assamica is more a tropical plant. It's a bit more delicate, the leaves are larger and it does better at lower altitudes," Hohenegger differentiates.

If they all come from the same plant, what makes green tea different from black tea or Oolong tea? According to Hohenegger, a process called oxidation determines the type of tea. "In tea plantations, tea bushes are kept pruned at a height of 3 or 4 feet. This makes it easier for tea pluckers who only pluck the top leaves. The leaves start to wither as soon as you pluck them. Some tea leaves get rolled by machines that break the surface of the leaves. After this, black teas are put on big, long slabs and they are allowed to be exposed to the oxygen in the air. Green tea or white tea do not undergo this process. They are dried right away."

"Oolong, which mostly comes from Taiwan, is a semi-oxidized tea. It gets oxidized a little, but not as much as the black tea. In the trade, people refer to Oolong as a semi-fermented tea, but it's really not fermented. It's oxidized."

Coffee or tea?

Another interesting issue that almost always pops when talking about tea is whether it has more or less caffeine than coffee. "It was surprise to find in my research that there were so many different opinions about caffeine content in tea. It's a much more complex issue than we think. On a dry weight basis, a pound of tea has more caffeine than a pound of coffee. But when you brew each beverage, with a pound of tea, you can make 180 to 200 cups of tea. You can make only between 40 to 60 cups of coffee from a pound of coffee beans. That means, that on a per cup basis, there is more caffeine in regular drip coffee than in tea."