What are the cultural differences between tea and coffee drinking societies?
I imagine in my biases about Gen Z and Millennials that when they think of coffee, they think of Starbucks, or some other place that serves milkshakes with espresso. But that is not the vision of coffee that pops into my head. When I was young in America in the 1980s my dad had a coffee maker. It wasn’t automatic, it didn’t tell the time and it didn’t talk. You put ground coffee into it and brewed a large pot of coffee. Even at that time adding milk and sugar, honey or whatever wasn’t ubiquitous with drinking a cup of Joe. If it was the weekend, my father had it in a mug. If it was a weekday it went into a thermos and he drank a little most of the morning. Black. That was it. This was the experience of most people in my father’s generation. Many women in the states in the Baby Boomer Generation drank iced tea with or without sugar or artificial sweetener or with or without lemon.
Fast forward to today and the beverage industry and people’s taste has largely changed. There are of course outliers in this description. I am sure a lotta folks from my father’s generation drank espresso in New York, Boston or San Francisco. God knows they were drink’n it in Europe.
Tea has a long and complex history in the world too. Obviously and firstly, tea comes from China. Tea is at least as old as 2 to 3 thousand BCE. There is a story about an ancient Chinese emperor who is said to have lived around 2737 BC and was experimenting with different herbs to see their medicinal effect. One of these was tea. One of the other unnamed herbs made him sick, yet tea worked as the antidote to this effect. Some historians put the use and drinking of tea as early as the 10th century BC.
The British, along with other European imperialist powers began importing tea during the ‘modern’ period in the recent few centuries. In the west the British are most well known for drinking a ‘cuppa.’ They exported British tea culture to South Africa, the US, Canada, Australia and more. The term for porcelain also became ‘China.’ This is because the British imported it from China. Having good ‘China’ in the house is still considered a must in many cultures around the world. It is of course used for the drinking of teas which originated in China. Some people still today consider Chinese tea to be the best in the world.
Of course the period of the past 20 to 30 years has seen a lot of change. We could well be in a period to have passed by post-modernism, to a period less labeled. This might be more or less a time of liberal trade and rapid consumerism around the world, which leaves the consumerism of the 1980s spinning on its head. Digitization, mass movie culture and more have built a time of ‘super-fusion.’ Most American food for example is just a bigger, sweeter, saltier version of someone else’s food with more ingredients. American-Chinese food in America, called ‘Chinese food’ barely resembles actual Chinese food.
But this same practice of ‘improving’ or changing, or of fusing it with new ideas has spread everywhere. America’s Taco Bell has now opened a branch in Shanghai and another in Beijing. In the process it has transformed to suit its new home in China. Beans have been replaced with rice. Amazing. Simply amazing. Taco Bell was originally an American fast food bastardization of Mexican food. Now it has morphed yet again and become something so new that the tortilla may be the only thing that even resembles the place it was meant to imitate: Mexico. I still like it. I’d eat it in America and I’ve had it in Shanghai and Beijing, but it isn’t Mexican food. And whatever it is in the US isn’t even Mexican-American food. It has transcended one nations’ experience of cuisine. It has become super-fused-corporate food. And it’s delicious.
Starbucks clearly began in Seattle with trying to be like ‘Italian’ style coffee but quickly become milkshakes with caramel, extra sugar, toys, and so much we can’t get into it all. Now they’re all over the world. There are 4,704 Starbucks in China at the time of this sentence being written. I checked on Google mid-sentence. When I first visited Yantai, Shandong in 2013 I checked high and low for coffee. The only place I could get it was at the only western style bakery in the Chinese coastal city of 7 million people. I go there today and there are a hundred places to get any kind of coffee, from Starbucks and Luckin, to Costa Coffee and yes, McCafe. The trendiest place in the city is a café on the top floor of the super-mall ‘Joy City’ in the heart of Yantai.
Luckin is China’s answer to Starbucks. Sort of. It was anyway. And I don’t mean that it was because of its losses on the American stock market. There are still about 4,000 stores in China and I prefer it to Starbucks or any other brand. It is about two thirds the cost of it’s’ competitors. And its a damn good cup of Joe. I say ‘was’ China’s answer to Starbucks because tea is making a comeback in China in waves.
Wave one of this change is/was Hey Tea. It is about the same price-point as Starbucks except that is whips up tea with yogurt which can sometimes be translated as ‘cheese.’ And it super-fuses everything you can imagine and more.
Recently though a second wave has begun to wash coffee away. ‘Modern China Tea Shop’ stores are suddenly everywhere. And I mean there are 5 on the same block in Wuhan. Go to ‘Jianghan Walking Street’ in Wuhan, which is one of the two main drags people hang out. There are lines around the block at every one of these shops. The tea is about 15 or 18 RMB for a cup of tea. This is mostly milk, tea and sugar, but they are infused with flavors like grape, for example. That is like 2 to three dollars, well below the price point of Hey Tea. But in an area with 5 or 6 of these shops and lines this long, you might even get confused about which tea shop you are in line for.
M.A. History, Published Author, Radio Show Host, Vlogger
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