How Britain Fell Out Of Love With Its National Drink

Almost 30 years ago, the New York Times nodded to a curious trend that many older English folks were growing concerned about. One of the most quintessentially British pastimes was losing its luster, largely because it was falling out of favor with younger people who hadn’t the time — or really the interest — to prolong the tradition. “We’re a graying bunch, we tea drinkers, I’m afraid,” Derek Cooper, a well-known British food writer in his 60s, told the newspaper.

Cooper was a tea lover, but his kids preferred coffee. And that dynamic was growing all too common. Between the mid-1970s and the 1980s, tea consumption fell by 20 percent in the United Kingdom. Meanwhile, the country’s taste for coffee was blossoming, so much so, in fact, that in 1986 coffee sales in the U.K. outpaced tea sales for the first time in history.

Read more at independent.co.uk.