Coffee culture? maybe? Look at how people treat coffee in Canada and United States though. It's nasty black sludge that people drink purely for the stimulating effect and it usually needs to be disguised with milk and flavoured syrups. Shops which do prepare good quality coffee still need to sell milky drinks to get enough customers to stay open. Hipster image based marketing of vanilla lattes subsidizes the serious coffee drinkers.dizzo wrote:Lets just call a spade a spade!Bok wrote:Haha, that is so American of you.dizzo wrote: We are a coffee culture.
The UK is definitely a tea culture, or it still is, coffee is catching on with speed.
In Germany the North has also more of a tea tradition.
In Russia tea has been the favoured drink for centuries.
Turkey, the Maghreb, the whole middle east, etc. lots of tea culture to be had.
But your doubts are justified, any mainstreaming of tea culture can only be bad for quality tea, demand would outsize supply. With climate change that will only get worse, if not be the end of tea as we know it. But then we will probably have bigger problems than tea…
When I think of the idea of tea becoming "mainstream" in America, I think of what we have now, just on a grander scale. Large amounts of low quality teas stuffed into bags that sit on store shelves. I already look at the shelf in my supermarket and wonder how much space is used for cultivating this tea that could be used for high quality material. If the demand for tea grew in the west, quality tea would suffer greatly.
Let them eat cake...I mean...drink 64 oz Sunocos unbranded foodmart extra caffeinated dark roast!
I don't think most people here will ever bother with anything more complicated than tea bags, and even those that do usually stick to tea flavoured with fruit essential oils and bits of candy.
I'm sure there will always be a small enthusiast community that's interested in real pu-erh tea, but we will always be a minority.