Empires of Tea Speech - Notes & Overview:
Tea was available in Europe a few years before coffee and was used as a luxury and medical drink. There was much controversy on whether tea is good for a person and should be drunk. The Dutch doctor, Cornelius Bontekoe believed that the average person should consume tea every day or every hour. More specifically, a person should drink 10 cups a day, 50 cups if they were sick, and 200 cups at the most. A German doctor to the King of Denmark, Simon Pauli, thought that tea was poisonous from transporting it from China & quickens death.
Britain soon became the most tea-loving nation in Europe. At the beginning of 1700, almost no one in Britain drank tea, but by 1800, almost every one was drinking tea. At this time, prices of a pound of tea fell to 1/20 their original cost. This is because of the newly adopted practice of adulteration. Adulteration is the addition of ash, flowers, sawdust, & willow leaves or other items to a bag of tea. This allowed for more tea to be consumed than what imported. So much tea was produced in Europe at the time that everyone in every class could at least have 1-2 cups a day.
Out of the different flavors of tea during this era, black tea became more popular because it was more suited to survive longer voyages and was safer to drink because its adulterations were not poisonous like those of green tea.
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