AHC: Tea-drinking and coffee-drinking countries reversed

When talking about humanity's two favorite caffeinated beverages, different countries generally have different cultural preferences for either tea or coffee, making one or the other of them be more widely consumed.

A few OTL tea-drinking cultures:

-Britain (as well as most of the Commonwealth)
-China
-Japan
-Russia
-Ireland
-India

A few OTL coffee-drinking cultures:

-United States
-Brazil
-Italy
-France
-Spain
-Belgium
-Most Scandinavian countries (Norway, Sweden, Iceland in particular)

Your challenge, should you choose to accept it, is to take at least one of these countries, and reverse it to the other camp: have an OTL tea-drinking culture become an ATL coffee-drinking culture, and vice-versa. Any POD before 1900 is acceptable, and the causes of the differences can be political, economic, cultural, or anything else you can think of. You can choose as many countries as you want (whether just one, several, or all of them), from either or both sides, and have the changes be due to individual divergences for each country OR all-encompassing changes that bring about multiple reversals simultaneously.

Some of them might be more difficult than others to switch, but you'll just have to get creative!

How did the US get so big into tea? Was it because of taxes and tariffs, or because of immigrants from coffee-drinking countries, or some other reason?

China and India are the two largest producers of tea in the world, so I don't think that can really be reversed. Same with Japan to a less extent. Brazil is also one of the largest producers of coffee beans.

NZ and the UK have long drunk a lot of coffee, the latter for centuries.
I'd think that over the last ten - twenty years both of those countries have started drinking coffee in great quantities too.

What outcome are you trying to achieve?

Julius Vogel said:

What outcome are you trying to achieve?

Click to expand...

The general cultural preference is for the other beverage. Plenty of people definitely do drink coffee in the UK, for example, but overall, tea is still the more traditionally popular and commonly-consumed drink, and more central to everyday life and culture. The outcome I'm thinking of would be, in this case, the opposite: coffee being considerably more popular and widely-consumed in the UK (for example) than tea (though some people in the UK may, in the ATL, still enjoy tea if they're so inclined).

Apparently America's coffee habit only began after the Haitan Revolution, because it was one of the few nations able and willing to trade with the island.

Tea as a British drink may be changed if British India does not happen as OTL.

When referring to popular caffeinated beverages, I would bet that caffeinated sodas are a fairly close contender to coffee in the U.S. I wouldn't be surprised if they beat them out, considering that they are the standard beverage at most restaurants.

Have Yellowstone volcano go off, and then have one side begin producing sooner after the explosion, there you go, the other side is out of buisness.