You may imagine that Great Britain is a nation of tea drinkers, but is this true? According to recent statistics, we Brits still drink more tea than coffee, but for how much longer? The amount of coffee we drink is slowly catching up with the amount of tea. While back in 1975, the average quantity of tea purchased per person per week amounted to 66g, the trend has continued downward over recent decades to a mere 24g in 2015. The trend for coffee has been upward over the same period and the equivalent amount of coffee consumed is now 23g, which suggests that the dominance of tea is nearly over!

It may surprise you then, that the British used to be a nation of coffee drinkers. We were a nation of coffee shops, not tea houses. In fact, two of the first coffee shops in Britain were set up here in Oxford. The first was established in 1651 by an Armenian man named Harutiun Vartian and is today known as the The Grand Cafe. Directly opposite is Oxford's Queen's Lane Coffee House, established in 1654, also still in existence today.

The coffee for Britain’s coffee shops was mostly grown in Ceylon, now Sri Lanka and it was a huge industry. British merchants used intensive farming methods to grow sufficient beans to satisfy our national cravings for the brew. One unfortunate day, a disease called ‘Coffee Rust’ infected the plants on the island and wiped out the entire crop. Disastrously, it also meant that coffee could never be grown here again, and all the plants needed to be destroyed. The merchants were perplexed.

Scientists came from London to investigate and they confirmed the unfortunate truth. Coffee could never grow on Sri Lanka again. They suggested a solution may be to plant another crop…tea. Not wanting to lose any more money, the merchants pulled up all the coffee plants on the island and replaced them with tea. A mammoth task, causing Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the author of the Sherlock Holmes stories, to write:

“The Tea-fields of Ceylon are as true a monument to courage as is the lion at Waterloo*”.

It was only then that the British stopped drinking coffee and started drinking tea.

*a monument in Belgium commemorating the defeat of Napolean in battle.