DBWI: AHC: Make 'tea' ingrained in English culture

Those of you who've travelled a lot may have encountered that ubiquitous concoction of leaves and hot water that is called 'tea'. While it can be bought in various homeopathic shops over here it's never quite taken off to the extent that it has in other countries.

We Brits love our hot drinks, so it crossed my mind that it might be amusing to create an AH universe were tea is a staple of the English diet. Socio-cultural WIs are rare around here.

Any takers?
 
I think Tea lasted a while with Charles I but was displaced after the Puritan government brought in Cocaine calling it 'God's Gift' which meant it was added to the British table. So maybe have the monarchy maintained during the English Civil War then perhaps Tea might replace cocaine but then you'd have to be executed for crimes against Britishness.

OOC::p
 
Maybe if they were more successful in colonial escapades in China? Much like the popularity of Middle Eastern food today flowing from the old colony of Arabia?
 
I tried it once, it seemed rather bitter to me, and lacked the kick you get from coke. This was supposedly at one of the really good Chinese restaurants in San Francisco, so I can't imagine they would have made it wrong.

Considering the number of infusions you can make with much more flavorful herbs that were already available in Europe, I can't imagine why it would have ever taken off. I think it might be an acquired taste.

(OOC: In a world where benzoylmethylecgonine (in cocaine) is considered a food or food additive, caffeine will probably have the same status as OTL theobromine and phenelythamine (in chocolate))
 
So, let me get this straight: The OP wants cha to be popular in England today as it is in Castile right now?

I guess a good POD for that is if Henry XIII of England and Catalina of Castile and Aragon actually manage to bear a child before Catalina died. This would effectively make the child (whether a boy or a girl) the heir of three kingdoms. And maybe some of the commerce being generated from the Castilian trading posts in the Far East would creep its way to England, and the English would have been exposed to cha early on.

(OOC: The British Tea Culture has been around since the 19th Century. This thread should be moved to the 'Before 1900' category.)
 
Tea is good, you can actually get it in England if you look in Chinese shops. A bit on the plain side though, I don't see how it could compete with hot chocolate or any of the hard stuff amongst the general English population.
 

NothingNow

Banned
Wait. Tea is exclusively a hot drink? when did that happen? I've never had Tea Dulce served above room temperature. Cha OTOH, is a different kettle of fish.

Maybe if you could disrupt Guarana and Coffee shipments to England early enough, create a massive glut in Britain via indian conquest (Instead of the French taking most of the subcontinent,) or somehow insure more of an Iberian influence in England (although this might just strengthen that English Coffee and Cocaine Culture) it might be possible.

Or if the relatively impotent Green Teas weren't the most common variety exported to Europe, and swapped with either Black Teas or a strain of Rooibus, it might take off. After Cocaine, and what the English and Arabs call coffee, Green tea is quite impotent. of course, that'd end up effecting the American Tea culture as well.

(OOC: American as in the Americas as a whole, but more specifically the Gulf Coast and Caribbean in this instance.)
 
Another reason for the unpopularity of tea stems from religion. Throughout the latter part of the nineteenth and throughout the twentieth centuries, the Mormon, Seventh Adventist Day Church, and the Roman Catholic Church have all discouraged hot drinks such as coffee and tea.
 
I rekkon they might aquire the habit from the US of A, what with our nation facination with tea... of course, we began that in protest to the British love of coffee and cocain, so it might take some doing!
 
...that'd end up effecting the American Tea culture as well.

(OOC: American as in the Americas as a whole, but more specifically the Gulf Coast and Caribbean in this instance.)

I rekkon they might aquire the habit from the US of A, what with our nation facination with tea... of course, we began that in protest to the British love of coffee and cocain, so it might take some doing!

Guys, we're talking about actual Tea, as in Camellia sinensis, not herbal infusions in general, which some people call tea, but generally in America don't contain any actual tea. I don't know where they started using that name for it, I think it came from the South. Most people up here in the North just call it "hot drink" (OOC: with the stress on the first syllable, like "hot dish").

There is no fascination with real tea in America. I've never seen it anywhere in the U.S. outside of Chinese restaurants. As I said in my previous post (OOC: Several posts above yours), I never had it until I tried it in a fancy Chinese restaurant in San Francisco, a thousand miles away from here.

We certainly did start drinking a lot of herbal infusions (plus chocolate) around the time of the American Revolution, but it's not like actual tea was available to us to replace the coffee we were turning down. Most of those infusions, however, were still laced quite liberally with cocaine. No one really wanted to give that stuff up.
 
Last edited:
I don't think tea would really work in English culture. I mean, the English mostly have hot drinks with meals, and studies show that tea severely hampers the absorption of non-heme iron. There is so little meat in the typical English diet that the rates of anemia would skyrocket in such a scenario.

Plus, the English love to add milk to their hot drinks. Just thinking about adding milk to tea sounds absolutely disgusting, and that's not even taking into account what dairy caseins might do to the antioxidants in the drink.
 
There are so many things to change just to make a drink popular. Maybe more successful colonial adventure would help. Or preventing the decades of "republican war". Still even in France they don't drink tea that mutch even though they had the biggest colonial empire in the world and that some land produce actual tea. It just don't seems to suit occidental palate.
 
Top