Tea in England

There was no tea in Europe until the 1600s, when it was first brought by Portuguese and Dutch traders. In the early 1600s Dutch traders started bringing tea to Europe in large quantities.

It first arrived in Britain in the 1650s, when it was served as a novelty in London’s coffee houses. It was an expensive product and one only for the rich and often kept under lock and key. Tea was first advertised in a London Journal c.1660 by Thomas Garway, the owner of a London coffee house and the first to sell and brew tea on the premises

In 1662, the newly restored monarch Charles II married Catherine of Braganza, the daughter of Portugal’s King John IV. Catherine of Braganza who became Queen of England, Scotland and Ireland, had a taste for Chinese tea, known as ‘Tchaa’. When she arrived from Portugal to marry Charles II, she brought with her a casket of tea. Thus tea-drinking became fashionable at the Royal Court.

The king and queen got married on 21 May, and Portugal provided several ships of luxury items as it had been agreed. One of those items included a chest of tea, the favorite drink of the Portuguese Court.

The first tea shop for ladies opened in 1717 by Thomas Twining and slowly tea shops began to appear throughout England making the drinking of teas available to everyone. By the early 18th century, tea was sold in coffeehouses all over the country, and consumed by all classes.
Tea in England

Apple cider in England

The word ‘cider’ has its roots in ancient Hebrew. Sheker, which means strong drink, was translated into the Greek sikera, the Latin sicera, and then the French cidre.  The English called it cyder or cider.

The Spanish were making sidra when the Romans invaded Britain in 55 BC and found the Celts fermenting the juice of native crab apples to make cider.

Interest in cider in Britain faded after the fall of Rome because many orchards were abandoned when invading Jutes and Danes attacked British settlements.

After the Norman Conquest on 1066, cider consumption became widespread in England and orchards were established specifically to produce cider apples. The Normans had developed a number of apple varieties which they then introduced to England. In the 15th century, real progress was made in its presentation. Cider is a way of life.

During medieval times, cider was used to pay workers at the monasteries.

An English noble, Lord Scudamore, is credited worth having bottles cider as early as the 1640s, when almost all cider was stored in wooden barrels and drawn off ‘on draft’ as needed.

By the seventeenth century it was so beloved that the English wrote poems and songs about cider.

Cider production in England was estimated at 55 million gallons in 1900.  In the early 1980s cider sales had risen to over 60 million gallons per year.
Apple cider in England

Introduction of coffee into England

Venetian traders introduced coffee into Europe in 1615. Leonhard Rauwolf, a doctor and botanist was the first European to mention coffee.

In 1650 at Oxford University, the person name Jacobs opened the first coffeehouse.

Two years later in London, Pasqua Rosee, a Greek, opened coffeehouse and printed the first coffee advertisement. In the advertisement coffee beans describes as the berry of which ‘a simple thing yielding a liquor of countless merit’.

The first printed reference to coffee in English appears as chaona in a note by a Dutchman, Paludanus, in Linschoten’s Travels, which is first published in Holland in 1595.

The coffee house was the earliest form of eating and drinking establishment in England. Later, coffee houses had become a familiar part of the urban landscape. It not only was a place of refreshment for ordinary citizens but became their meeting place for conversation and socializing.

For the price of a penny, it was possible to gain admission and be served with a dish of coffee and a pipe of tobacco.

Seeking a place to produce coffee that belonged to the empire, the British government began coffee cultivation in Ceylon around 1658.

By 1700 there, by some accounts, more than 2000 London coffee houses, occupying more premises and paying more rent than any other trade.
Introduction of coffee into England