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March 25, 2005
Tea in the US
I've finally run out of teas at my place to review. So, that means a load of tea buying is going to occur soon. I noticed that Stephane in Taipei read some of my reviews and had the following comment:
... you can see that in the US people almost exclusively buy branded teas... and are willing to pay good prices for few tea leaves.
That's an interesting observation, but speaking from experience as someone who lives in the US, I can say that Stephane's observation is only partially true. Sure, Americans buy mostly branded teas. By 'branded' I'm assuming Stephane means tea that's distributed by larger franchises. However, I think the number of people 'willing to pay good prices for a few tea leaves' is not that high. Let me go into more details on both of those observations...
Undoubtably, coffee is much more popular than tea in the US. Just go into a Starbucks, and you'll see that the ratio of folks ordering coffee over tea is quite high. It almost seems like tea is supplied as an afterthought at more coffeehouses. Don't even get me started about teahouses - there are not nearly enough of them.
Now, knowing what I said in the previous paragraph, you can see why there are almost no 'unbranded' teas being sold. How could someone hope to open a mom-and-pop tea shop selling generic teas around here and do a brisk business when many folks who think of drinking tea will just go to Starbucks? I'll bet in Taiwan, tea shops are plentiful. The last time I was in Taiwan, I didn't check for tea shops, so don't quote me on that.
I think many folks in the US have rather low expectations for tea. That is to say, tea connoisseurs are rare. Here, I routinely see folks order their 'venti, skim, caramel mocha with no whipped cream', but couldn't tell you the difference between black and green tea. Whereas coffee is more of a way of life here, tea is a cyclic fad. 'Quick! Buy some tea, I hear it has antioxidants!'
I think I only know a few people who are as interested in drinking tea as I am. These are people who like tea for its own sake and care very little about its health benefits. It's a lot of fun to talk to these friends about tea. These are also the only people I know who are willing to drop some dough on good tea. So, going back to Stephane's obsrvation about people in the US spending serious money on tea: I wish that was true, but it's not. If it was true, then perhaps we'll see more generic family-run tea shops popping up to compete with the larger distributors.
Posted by Kathy at March 25, 2005 11:15 PM