Why british drink tea

Why do Brits eat lunch at their desks? Great British Mag. Why do Brits wear a paper poppy in November? Who was Guy Fawkes? Due to its high price, lower classes couldn't really afford tea, however milk was cheap. So the lower poorer classes filled their cups with cheaper milk and added but a dash of the valuable tea, while the higher richer classes could afford to add a dash of milk to a cup of tea in answer 3 it is said that they did this to water down the rather bitter taste of the tea.

Up to this day, people do pay close attention to whether you add milk to the tea, or tea to the milk. While per se this makes no difference to the actual flavour, it does indicate which class your family is from.

It has nothing to do with class. I pour milk into my cup first as it does an 'automatic' stir and that means I don't have to use a spoon. You might have heard that caffeine in tea gives a different high from the caffeine in coffee. When volunteers consume both caffeine and theanine — versus caffeine and other tea molecules — they show moderately more alertness and better ability to switch between tasks than with caffeine alone.

The amount in a given cuppa may not be the same as the doses given during a study, however, and the effect of theanine is not enormous. But all on its own, the caffeine will give you a nice lift. The humble cup of tea is celebrated in the poshest London hotels Credit: Alamy.

But why do these melanges of molecules mean so much to British people? And what does your preference, in terms of tea type and how you drink it, mean about you? Anthropologist Kate Fox writes in her book Watching the English that there are several clear messages sent whenever a Brit makes a cuppa. She observes that the strongest brews of black tea — with the largest doses of these molecules — are typically drunk by the working class. The brew gets progressively weaker as one goes up the social ladder.

Milk and sweetener have their own codes. Why does England drink more tea than coffee? Within fifty years of the opening of the first coffee house in England, there were two thousand coffee houses in the City of London, alone! Toward the close of the seventeenth century, however, the East India Company was much more interested in tea than in coffee. And when the coffee house finally succumbed, tea, and not coffee, was firmly entrenched as the national drink of the English people.

While it is often said that the British East India Company owed its birth to pepper, its amazing development was due to tea. Its early adventures in the Far East brought it to China, whose tea was destined later to furnish the means of governing India.