Hey everyone and welcome to the Understandable English Podcast.
I am so excited for today's podcast because it is on a very interesting topic for me and hopefully, for you.
That topic is tea.
Tea.
We all know that there is a huge stereotype about tea in the UK.
British people love tea.
And this stereotype, in my opinion, is very, very, very, very true.
But before I start to talk about that, I just want to say that I tried to make a video podcast for the last episode, but unfortunately there were some issues with the video recording, so I am not sure if it is yet going to be possible.
But I would really like to be able to do this for future episodes.
Firstly, I really hope that everything is well with you and that you're having a wonderful day, no matter where or when you're listening to this podcast.
I really appreciate your support and...
Just you for listening.
So today we are going to be stepping back in history to a time where the British were all around the world.
The British Empire, the total area of the UK, spread across the world.
This was the time when tea as we know it today, the idea of black tea or tea with milk, was really born and the popularity was spread.
It moved across the world.
Of course tea has existed for thousands of years.
It has been popular in China, India and various other countries.
But it was during this time in the British Empire that tea became worldwide, that the popularity of tea increased.
So of course, as you may know, tea can't actually grow in the UK.
The climate, the weather is just not warm enough.
It has never grown here.
So how did they get it?
How did tea arrive here?
Well, as many of you might already know, There was a huge company called the East India Company, or the East India Trading Company.
This was a large organization, a large company in Great Britain.
They traded all around the world.
Traded means they moved products and sold them.
So they took items from one country and took them to another to sell them, making money.
They traded all sorts of items, from tea to coffee, spices and even something called opium, which is a drug.
At one point in history this company actually made up.
It accounted for over half of the world's trade.
This is crazy.
Imagine that.
One company had half of the world's trade.
However, they definitely weren't all good.
In fact, these were the same people who invaded India.
They made it a colony, a part of the British Empire.
And they did a lot of awful, terrible things.
And they did all of this for money and wealth.
They even traded and used slaves.
Of course, this was a completely different time.
But today we will be focusing on tea, not slavery or the invasion of India.
So this company, the East India Company, was the first to bring tea to the UK.
In the UK, there were already coffee houses.
So, almost like cafes.
Like Starbucks, I guess.
They sold very many different types of coffee.
The first record of tea being sold was in 1657 by a bloke, a fellow, a man named Thomas Garway.
He sold tea leaves and also liquid tea to the public in his coffee house.
He actually claimed that tea made you lose weight and that it made your body very active and healthy and it kept you healthy until old age.
Of course, he had no proof of this and he just wanted to sell tea.
After tea first appeared, it quickly gained popularity across all of the coffee houses, across all of the cafes, I guess.
And by the year 1700, over 500 coffee houses sold tea.
However, it wasn't all fun and games.
This was very bad news for all of the owners of pubs and taverns.
So, bars as you would call them.
Because tea had now become the favourite drink of the population.
Especially the working class population, those who worked in factories and other lower paid jobs.
They were now buying a lot less alcohol and drinking more tea.
At the same time, this was also a big problem for the British government.
Why, you may ask?
Because they made so much money off of taxes on alcohol.
So a tax is a fee, an extra bit of money that you have to pay the government.
Since less people were drinking alcohol, the government made less money off of the taxes from alcohol.
You can probably guess what they decided to do.
Charles II, who was the current King of England, decided Hmm, I have a really good idea.
How about I tax tea?
I add a fee, an extra price to tea.
It got so crazy that they increased the tax on tea to 119%.
This made tea extremely expensive.
It was ridiculous.
So naturally, what happened next was a new illegal trade of tea, almost like drugs.
Many ambitious individuals decided to take tea and smuggle it into the country.
Smuggle means to bring it into the country illegally without getting caught.
They used to hide it in different places, and apparently one of the most popular places to hide tea was in churches.
Of course, eventually into the future, the taxes were reduced and tea consumption became much more normal, so people didn't have to pay extreme prices.
That is the basic history of tea in the UK.
It is worth noting that whenever I say tea, I mean black tea.
But there are still other areas of this traditional drink that we can still talk about and understand.
One of these is, why do British people drink tea with milk?
Some people find this idea disgusting or just not nice.
Why milk?
The reason for this is actually quite surprising.
I didn't even know until I researched it. until I looked up about it for this podcast.
During this time period, people used to drink tea from china cups.
These are very delicate, they're very thin, and they can break easily.
The problem was that when you poured hot tea, so hot water, into these cups, it would cause them to crack, it would cause them to break from the heat.
So people added cold milk into the bottom of the cup first, then they added tea and then they added the hot water.
This allowed the temperature to be cool enough so that the cups wouldn't break.
And of course over time people got used to the taste, only drank tea with milk.
So in fact the history of tea with milk in the uk is nothing to do with taste.
But of course now it is because it is so heavily in British culture and such a tradition that people prefer milk with tea.
They simply like the taste now.
And now people often argue about whether to put the milk in the cup first or the milk at the end.
So after you've added the tea and the water,
I personally add the milk first.
If you drink tea with milk, I would be interested to hear which you add first, the milk or the tea.
Finally, it's worth mentioning that there are now many different types of tea in the UK, but people still prefer black tea on average.
It is still the most popular hot drink by far.
When I first went to Russia, my girlfriend there showed me many different types of tea And honestly I was quite surprised because all of my life I had practically just drank tea with milk, black tea with milk.
I tried black tea with lemon and various other types of tea and flavors.
And honestly, I really enjoyed them.
But every time I come home, or even when I was living in Russia, I usually return to black tea with milk.
It reminds me of home and it's a very soothing, calming drink for me.
That's everything for my talk about tea.
I hope it was interesting for you and that you learned something new.
And most of all, you got to practice listening in English.
And if you want, I have a small challenge for you.
You can message me on Instagram, in English if you can, and tell me, do you like tea?
What types of tea do you drink?
Do you think that tea is popular in your country?
And really, any other thoughts that you have on the topic.
This has been the Understandable English Podcast.
And I'm Oliver.
And thank you so much for listening.
I will see you guys in the next episode.
Goodbye.
