OXFORD, England — “Tea has my heart,” said Liz Coleman over a latte with almond milk at the Grand Café in Oxford. “But I can’t live without coffee.”
As a British woman of Persian descent, Coleman, 31, said tea looms large in her home life, but when she goes out, it’s always coffee.
Tea is deeply embedded in the cultural fabric of Britain and centuries of tradition made it the Country’s favorite hot drink. But coffee has increasingly challenged that status, and a recent survey suggested it had finally unseated tea from its pride of place.
So is coffee really the new national drink of the British? The question is complicated.
Ham Raz, 51, owner of the Grand Café, said that when he first came to Oxford 30 years ago, “the British didn’t want to take so many risks. Now everyone is drinking coffee.”
The coffee boom dates back to the late 1990s and early 2000s, when chains like Britain’s Costa Coffee and American brands like Starbucks started a national obsession.
But perhaps it is Oxford’s newest cafes, driven by its customers’ preferences for high-quality artisanal coffee, that offer a window into the drink’s growing role in Britons’ routines. At the Missing Bean cafe, Liz Fraser, 48, an Oxford-born travel writer, recalled her first “real” cup of coffee.
“I had my first cappuccino in the UK in 1998, shortly after the birth of my first daughter,” she said, adding that “it was like entering a different country.” Until then, I had only had instant coffee.
Ori Halup, one of the founders of Missing Bean, said that since the cafe opened in 2009, specialty coffee has boomed as an alternative to chains on almost every corner. But he acknowledges that tea still occupies an important place in the national psyche.
“I think people still drink more tea than coffee, just in a different way,” he said. “You drink tea at home because it is practically free compared to a coffee outside.”
Sharon Hall, chief executive of the UK Tea and Infusions Association, said in a statement that Britons drank more than 100 million cups of tea each day — 2 million more than the estimated total for coffee.
But in a study of 2,400 Britons published in August by Statista, 63 percent said they drank coffee regularly, and 59 percent regularly chose tea. The money spent on coffee in supermarkets was more than twice as much as on tea, although coffee is usually more expensive.
At Cardews of Oxford, staff members agreed that people were increasingly looking for coffee in their store. But tourists tended to look for something quintessentially British.
“I have to kindly tell you that none of this tea is actually grown in England, although we do have English blends,” said Isaac Lloyd, who was working behind the counter.
Jane Pettigrew, director of the UK Tea Academy, said tea has been part of the country’s culture for more than 350 years and she doesn’t think it will go away anytime soon.
“For many years they’ve been saying, ‘Oh, coffee is so much more exciting and people drink more,’” he said. “And I’m not willing to accept that.”
By: Megan Specia
BBC-NEWS-SRC: http://www.nytsyn.com/subscribed/stories/6973958, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-11-07 19:00:07
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