Steeped in Tea

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A popular countermovement to caffeine had been brewing for over a decade in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, where a young man named Mo Siegel was picking wild herbs near his home in Boulder, Colorado. Amid a growing wave of natural foods introduced in the 1970s, Siegel wanted to offer Americans a healthy beverage as an alternative to the wan coffee brews favored by his parents' generation and the handful of specialty black teas-mostly Lipton, Twinings, and Bigelow's Constant Comment-then on supermarket shelves. Siegel faced stiff resistance peddling his novel herbal tea blends, which he called Celestial Seasonings. The buyer for a major supermarket chain-Siegel declines to say which one-once threw a box of Red Zinger against a wall and kicked him out of his office. Lipton's head tea taster at the time belittled herbal teas as 'weeds by the swamp.' (Lipton is now one of the world's largest producers of herbal teas.)

Printed with colorful pictures and New Age quotations, Celestial Seasonings boxes eventually found their way into millions of households and reintroduced Americans to the personal and social ritual of drinking tea. Blends like Egyptian Chamomile also helped reclaim tea's exotic character, imagery that goes a long way in the marketing of specialty tea today. Roastaroma offered a crossover for curious coffee lovers, and others like Sleepytime established tea as a beverage with an occasion-and also a function-for drinking at different times of the day.

Celestial Seasonings helped pave the way for the tsunami of ready-to-drink teas that swept into the market next. In 1987 Snapple introduced bottled iced tea with an 'all natural' tagline on labels that, ironically, depicted the Boston Tea Party. Now accounting for one-third of domestic tea sales, and composing the single largest segment of tea, ready-to-drink teas sate Americans' desire for health, convenience, and speed of delivery. Many of us do want refreshing and calm, but we still want it on the go. While most teas on the market are still brewed with low-grade tea leaves, today's fertile crop of specialty tea brands and dedicated tea shops introducing higher-grade loose leaf blends are raising the standard once set by the lowly mass market tea bag.

The events of that December evening in Boston may have initially served as a symbolic rejection of British influence and authority, but they ultimately allowed American society to write its own circuitous social history with tea-to eventually reclaim a foreign drink with a foreign set of cultural practices as its own. Sipping a cup
of tea today provokes a mix of imagery, some of it still an antiquated and imagined notion of imperial England or China, but much of it an amorphous global fusion endemic to nowhere in particular. We drink herbal teas even when we're not sick. We make lattes out of green tea. We have taken the symbols of traditional tea cultures-chai on the streets of Delhi, oolong tea in a Beijing teahouse, afternoon tea service in London, chats around the samovar in St. Petersburg-and, through a process resembling the construction of an ethnic food court in a shopping mall, put them under one proverbial roof.

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