How do you drink your tea?

Raise a cuppa to celebrate World Tea Day on 21 May.

Globally we drink 3 billion cups daily, and it’s second only to water as our most-consumed beverage.

I think just about everyone would guess where Camellia sinensis or tea originated if it was a pub quiz question – China.

And China tops the table of countries where tea is most imbibed, followed unsurprisingly by India and the UK. But would you guess that Turkey and Russia were also in the top five?

Luxembourg loves coffee

And Luxembourg? Well it’s a coffee nation and World Coffee Day is…OK I don’t know when it is.

People in the Grand Duchy drink on average more than one thousand cups of coffee per year each, versus about 150 cups of tea.

That’s in part down to the way tea is served in cafes, in my view.

Tepid water with a desiccated tea bag on the side, pulled from a cupboard where tea goes to die. A tragic way for a majestic drink to end up.

Whilst the Grand Duchy generally imports rather exports tea, there is a farmer’s co-operative in the Upper Sûre region bucking that trend.

They have been producing Téi vum Séi since 1993, with 20 different tea types including nettle, fennel, peppermint and chamomile. It’s sold locally but exported too.

The plants are grown without chemical fertilisers or pesticides, and the tea is gluten-free. Herbs and plants are cold-dried’ which is “the gentlest way to dry them, as it retains their valuable compounds and ingredients,” says Charles Marx on the co-operative’s website.

Do flowers count as tea?

But to me, tea is black and served with milk, not made from flowers and herbs.

It must come from a teapot that hasn’t been washed for twenty years, and be strong enough to stand a spoon in (my British upbringing).

Or it must be boiled with a spice mix including cardamoms, ginger, and cinnamon, poured from a great height into a glass not a cup, and delivered piping hot by a small boy (my Indian roots).

To many of my international and Luxembourgish friends – who visibly quake at my unwashed teapot – tea is not this. It is a healthy and refreshing concoction featuring herbs and flowers.

They are mostly, if not all, coffee drinkers. Tea is more a medication to treat ailments, or when you have a cold. Tea is a bedtime drink. Or more specifically chamomile tea.

Chamomile tea is the holy grail of herbal tea. Used in the right quantities it could probably bring world peace because everyone would get at least 8 hours of sleep every night.

Why am I the only person who thinks chamomile tea tastes like grass clippings and looks like something you might deliver in a plastic pot for lab testing?

But, I guess that tea comes in many shapes, forms and guises.

Tea made with panda poo anyone?

It’s the stuff of ceremony and ritual. It brings people together.

Teapots come in all shapes and sizes  © Photo credit: Shutterstock

It can be brewed in a teapot, but also in a giant metal urn like Samovar tea which is flavoured with jam.

It can be served in a teacup or in a scooped-out watermelon, as is the case with Taiwanese watermelon green tea.

It can be ingested by small worms and pooped out, or fertized with panda dung and served up as surprisingly expensive tea.

Maybe chamomile tea is not so bad after all.

Let’s just say “it’s not my cup of tea” when “I’m spilling the tea,” and want to avoid a “storm in a tea cup.”

Or perhaps if I want to do that, I should get a fortune teller to read my tea leaves.

Tea has many uses

Even if you don’t drink it, tea has a multitude of uses.

Not just incorporated into quaint English phrases and Gen Z vernacular, tea can be used as a compost to repel slugs and aphids.

Cold tea bags are perfect for puffy eyes, if you’ve been crying after someone spilled too much tea.

It’s also perfect for pirates who want to make their treasure map look authentic and sea-weathered. (Yes I have used tea bags to dye paper with my kids. What mum hasn’t tried this?)

Whatever way you drink yours, put the kettle on for World Tea Day and marvel at how this simple plant, discovered thousands of years ago, has given us humans so much joy.