Genteel Pause : Cup of Tea: Americans Drink It Up

It’s 7 a.m. Sharon Fraser, an Encino financial planner, ignores the pile of market reports on her desk. She leans back in her chair, devoting her full attention to the fruity aroma of Ceylon Breakfast tea coming from the mug.

“My last civilized moment of the day,” she sighed.

It’s 4 p.m. Margaret Thurmond, an activity director for a counseling program, sits on a flowered apricot divan in the lounge of the Westwood Marquis Hotel. She sips a steaming cup of Vintage Darjeeling and nibbles on cream cheese and watercress sandwiches. As a harpist plays, she talks “lighter things” with a lady acquaintance who is getting over a divorce.

Tea and and T-bills. Or tea and sympathy.

A Growing Market

Whatever the occasion, consumers in growing numbers are finding that tea is their cup of tea. Nearly 200 million pounds of tea was imported into the United States in 1984 and more than $1 billion worth of tea was expected to be sold in this country during the year.

Across the country, tea lovers are lining up for the genteel afternoon teas being offered at the Westwood Marquis and Trumps in Los Angeles, the Fairmont in San Francisco, the Drake in Chicago, the Plaza and St. Regis hotels in New York City, Maison Gourmet in Atlanta.

Tea has become a staple on college football team training tables. Prominent charitable groups are opting for tea parties instead of cocktail hours. Classes on how to make good tea are repeatedly sold out. And some enthusiastic gardeners are even growing it in their backyards.

Exotic Imports

Grocery stores have expanded their tea sections to include bulk teas and exotic and expensive imported varieties. Retail stores report a brisk business in accouterments--expensive silver tea services, $60 kettles equipped with harmonicas that play tunes, designer tea cozies that look like cats, tea infusers shaped like gingerbread houses.

Not since Prohibition has tea been so trendy. Only Britain imports more tea than America does, and the Americans may surpass even the British in tea consumption by 1990, industry experts say.

Everyone seems to be jumping on the tea cart--such well-known figures as Carol Burnett, Shirley MacLaine, Jessica Lange, Sally Field, Sylvester Stallone, Martin Sheen and John Travolta, and California’s Democratic Sen. Alan Cranston, often take afternoon tea.

One recent evening, Los Angeles City Councilwoman Peggy Stevenson was to speak before a homeowners’ association. She was battling a sore throat and was afraid that she would have to cancel.

“I had a sandwich and cup of orange pekoe. It’s a pick-me-up anytime, especially when I’m not feeling quite right,” said Stevenson, who drinks coffee in the morning and switches to tea in the afternoon. “I like plain old tea. Nothing fancy like jasmine. I don’t like to drink flowers.”

“Tea. It is good for the heart,” said Jacques Camus, vice president of the Westwood Marquis, which was one of the first Los Angeles hotels to make afternoon tea a grand event.

Camus, like many other tea lovers, said that tea not only brings people together, but is inexpensive, low in calories and has calming properties that are good for the mind as well as the body.

At one time tea was not looked upon so favorably, and in fact, was considered unpatriotic. When the colonists dumped 300 chests into Boston Harbor in 1773 to protest the British government’s high tax on the commodity, they not only sparked the War for Independence, but gave coffee drinking a big boost.

However, in the last 20 years, coffee consumption in this country has declined, while tea has been steaming ahead.

Tea’s popularity has accompanied that of the culinary arts in general. The same health-conscious urban dwellers who buy wines and fancy cheeses are also reaching on the shelves for tea.

One possible reason is tea’s lower caffeine content. While coffee has 100 to 150 milligrams of caffeine per cup, tea contains only 10 to 50.

The Tea Council of the United States, believing that even more people would drink tea if they could make or get a good cup of it, recently began a nationwide campaign to educate the public, especially restaurateurs, on the finer points of tea preparation.

Water Not Right

“The British weren’t appalled because we dumped the tea into Boston Harbor. They were upset because the water wasn’t the right temperature,” said the Tea Council’s executive director, Don Wiederecht.

Tea lover Helen Gurley Brown, editor of Cosmopolitan magazine, recalled her own struggle several years ago when she and her husband were invited to take tea with oil billionaire J. Paul Getty at his Sutton Place home in London.

She was asked to serve. “It was like figuring out how to run an Apple computer,” she said. “There were dishes and flatware spread out endlessly. There was a silver urn for hot water, another with tea, another with coffee, another for who knows what, and little petits fours to be served. I was overwhelmed, and pretty proud of myself when I got through it.”

These days, Brown prefers the tea served in tall crystal glasses at the Russian Tea Room not far from her Manhattan office. On a recent afternoon, she met with Ms. Magazine editor Gloria Steinem, another connoisseur who uses a bit of preserves to sweeten her tea.

The Dutch first brought tea to Europe from the Far East in the 1600s. Considered a luxury, it was taxed heavily, and at $100 a pound, only the royalty and rich could afford it. The lady of the manor kept the tea in elaborate locked caddies and carefully weighed out the servings. And out of their fear for their precious porcelain a custom was born--adding milk to the cups so that the boiling water would not crack the cups.

Richard Dick, a 70-year-old chemist who drinks tea for a living, is more concerned about ruined tea than ruined tea cups.

Dick, who tastes 100 teas a day as tea examiner for the Food and Drug Administration, is responsible for making sure that all the tea imported into this country meets minimum standards. That means all the tea we drink, since virtually none is grown domestically. About 70% of the tea Americans drink comes from Sri Lanka, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Malawi and Tanzania.

Importers provide Dick with samples of the cargo, which is tested against standards set down yearly by the U.S. Board of Tea Experts, a group made up of industry experts. If a tea is condemned, the importer can appeal the decision to another group, the federal Tea Appeals Board.

Last year, Dick said, several shipments of Formosa black teas were found to have a peculiar taste. The producers wanted a fine looking tea so they had been polishing it with limestone and marble dust, which got into the product.

Tea producers several years ago attempted unsuccessfully to get the FDA to enforce an 1897 law that forbids beverages brewed from leaves of plants other than tea from being labeled “tea,” Dick said. However, the agency has tended to ignore such transgressions, unless the packaging does not clearly state the contents.

Called ‘Boiled Weeds’

Like wine enthusiasts who would not be caught dead sipping sweet, fizzy pop wines, many tea lovers consider these herb teas merely “boiled weeds” because they do not contain any tea. (A member of the Camellia family known as Camellia sinensis, true tea is a hardy evergreen plant.)

But just as pop wines spurred younger consumers to try better wines, the herb tea boom which began as part of the health food and fitness movement in the 1970s has encouraged many Americans to try other teas.

Celestial Seasonings, the most popular producer, offered teas made of herbs that were handpicked in the Rocky Mountains by its company president, Mo Siegel. The line, which includes the almost legendary hibiscus-flavored Red Zinger, is still packed in whimsical packages adorned with philosophical sayings. Today, Siegel is a millionaire and the company, which was recently acquired by Dart & Kraft Inc., accounts for more than 50% of the $100-million national herb tea market.

However, herb tea was first looked upon by the industry as an oddity and even New Jersey-based Thomas J. Lipton Co., which sells more than 50% of all the tea purchased in the United States, did not offer an herb tea line until 1981.

“For years, all there was out there was black tea. There was variety in soups, in cake mixes, even in rice. But not tea. They finally figured out that it doesn’t have to be dull,” said Bob Crawford, vice president of sales and marketing for Connecticut-based R. C. Bigelow. One of the pioneers of the flavored tea industry, Bigelow introduced Constant Comment in 1945. The blend, which contains tea, orange rind and spices, is one of the top-selling flavored teas in the country. But it was not until the 1960s that Bigelow expanded its line of flavored teas.

Sales Rise Steadily

Tea sales nationally increase about 4% a year. The figure, while seemingly not spectacular, is considered significant in the food industry where mature products such as tea do not usually enjoy any growth at all, said Jack Maxwell, an analyst and managing director of Laidlaw Ansbacher Inc.

Grocery stores have expanded their tea sections, some even selling it bulk in bins. Debra Lambert, a Safeway Stores spokeswoman, said the grocery chain now buys 100 types of tea, and that sales in some areas such as San Francisco have doubled in the last year.

Tea, unlike coffee, has been able to benefit from the country’s increasing preference for cold drinks. About 70% of all tea consumed is iced, compared to only 2% for coffee.

In recent months, the tea industry has followed the lead of soft drink makers, offering decaffeinated teas and those sweetened with the new low-calorie artificial sweetener aspartame.

“Our new decaffeinated tea is going gang busters; we can’t make it fast enough,” said Derek Carroll, vice president of corporate relations for Lipton. The company is also optimistic about several other tea products, including canned tea sold in vending machines much like soft drinks.

Lipton also runs one of the country’s few experimental tea plantations, located in Summerville, S.C.

While true tea has never been grown commercially in the United States, industry experts estimate that 5% of the U.S. requirements could be grown here, mostly in the Southern states, if labor costs were not so high. The tea industry has been trying to perfect a mechanical plucker for a number of years.

Roger Windsor, a health center director, has been trying to grow tea in his backyard near Santa Rosa for three years. The first crop failed because it did not get enough sun. The second was doing fine until a friend failed to water it. Windsor hopes to grow enough to serve at his macrobiotics center, where students are taught a way of diet and living based on the Oriental theory of yin and yang.

“We eat many acid foods. Tea is alkaline. So it balances our diet. It’s a nice alternative to water,” Windsor said.