Tea and Tea Making
The origins of tea are to be found in China where tea has been drunk for centuries. There is evidence that tea was being drunk in the country as early as the Han dynasty in 206 BC-220 AD.
Although tea is now considered to be almost the national drink of the British we actually discovered the drink quite late. In European terms it was really the Dutch who brought tea to Europe at the end of the 16th century. At this time tea was expensive so it was not a drink that everyone could afford to buy.
It took until the mid 1600s for tea to become noticed in Britain. This is generally held to be down to the influence of the Portuguese wife of Charles II, Catherine of Braganza, who was a regular tea drinker and who made it a popular drink at court and then for the upper classes. From the 1660s the East India Company started importing tea to the country in earnest.
It took until the late 1700s when tea taxation was dropped to see the price of tea drop low enough for everybody to enjoy it. At this stage tea drinking amongst the working classes worried the upper classes as it was believed that drinking too much tea would make you weak!
In the 1830s the East India Company decided to try growing its own tea in India (and later in Ceylon) rather than importing it from China. The most notable tea grown here in this period was Assam. These imports again dropped the price of tea and people began drinking more of it.
Until the 20th century tea was brewed from tea leaves - tea bags were invented in the USA early in the century but again Britain was a late adopter and didn’t really start buying tea bags in earnest until the 1970s. Nowadays we drink all kinds of teas, from the traditional to herbal, fruit, black and green teas.
Even though we can now make a cup or pot of tea quite easily with tea bags many people still like to use tea leaves. Making tea this way would traditionally have involved a strainer to keep the leaves out of the cup but many teapots nowadays designed for leaf tea will have a built in strainer.