“Tea has my heart,” Liz Coleman explained as she sank into a chair beneath the gold-painted ceilings of the Grand Café in Oxford, England. “But I can’t live without coffee.”
Ms. Coleman, 31, got her caffeine fix from an almond milk latte she drank this month during a break from a nearby conference. As a British woman of Persian descent, tea plays an important role in her family life, she said, but when she is away it is always coffee.
Tea is deeply woven into the British cultural fabric, originating in the 1650s after Dutch traders brought it to Europe from China. Centuries of tradition have made it the country’s favorite hot drink. But coffee, a longtime rival, has increasingly challenged that status, and a recent study found that tea had finally been ousted from its top spot, sparking a statistical war as the two industries defend their beverages.
So is coffee really the new national drink of the British?
For cafe-goers in Oxford – where historians have tracked down some of Britain’s earliest coffee houses and where a new specialty coffee scene has exploded in recent years – it’s complicated.
The Grand Café stands on the site of a coffeehouse dating from 1650. On a recent morning, the café’s owner, Ham Raz, explained that tourists often ordered loose tea with their sandwiches, scones and cakes, but British customers typically drank coffee. .
When he first came to Oxford thirty years ago, he said: “The British didn’t want to take so many risks.”
“Now everyone is making coffee,” added the 51-year-old Mr. Raz to it. “And people’s behavior changes.”
The recent coffee boom can be traced back to the late 1990s and early 2000s, when mass-market coffee chains including Britain’s Costa Coffee and American brands like Starbucks sparked a national espresso obsession.
But it may be Oxford’s newer coffeehouses, driven by their customers’ preference for high-quality, artisanal coffee, that can offer insight into the drink’s increasing claim on Britons’ routines – and on their wallets. At the Missing Bean café, Liz Fraser scribbled in her notebook and enjoyed a double shot of cortado.
Ms Fraser, 48, an Oxford-born travel writer, clearly remembers her first cup of ‘real’ coffee.
“I had my first cappuccino in Britain in 1998, just after my first daughter was born,” she said, adding that it “felt like I was entering another country.” Until then, she had only drunk instant coffee.
According to the British Coffee Association, 80 percent of households in Britain still buy instant coffee for home consumption, especially those aged 65 and over, although ground coffee and pods are becoming increasingly popular, especially among the younger generations. The country drinks approximately 98 million cups of coffee per day.
The Missing Bean has been serving cups of hot stuff since 2009. Since then, specialty coffee has taken off as an alternative to the chains on almost every corner, said one of the cafe’s founders, Ori Halup.
“I would say very proudly at the time that we were the only good coffee you could get here, and now I can give you ten great places to have coffee in Oxford,” he said, adding: “And that option is amazing.”
The Missing Bean has grown to include five cafes – some outside Oxford – a coffee roaster, a bakery and an online store that ships across the UK. Baristas behind the cafe counters put time, care and attention into each drink, such as creating intricate art for lattes in the frothy milk as they pour.
“It’s something you can’t do at home, which always adds magic,” Mr. Halup said. “Most people don’t have an espresso machine, grinder and everything else.”
But he acknowledges that tea still plays a major role in the national psyche. “I think people still drink more tea than coffee, just in a different way,” he said. “You drink tea at home because it is practically free compared to a cup of coffee outside.”
Mr Halup is just one of many skeptics about recent reports that Britain’s growing coffee culture has displaced tea.
A survey published by Statista in August was small (just 2,400 people), but 63 percent of respondents said they regularly drink coffee, while only 59 percent regularly chose tea.
Sharon Hall, the chief executive of the UK Tea & Infusions Association, said in a statement that Britons drank more than 100 million cups of tea every day – two million more than the estimated total for coffee.
According to data shared by Kantar, between August 2022 and August 2023, UK consumers bought almost twice as many packs of coffee in supermarkets as tea, compared to coffee. But this evidence is questionable: a pack of 200 tea bags would last much longer than a 200-gram bag of ground coffee, which would normally yield about 30 cups. The total money spent on coffee in UK supermarkets was also more than double that on tea, although coffee tends to be more expensive.
Jane Pettigrew, founder and director of studies at the UK Tea Academy, said it has always been difficult to accurately track Britain’s favorite hot drink. Tea, she said, has been part of the country’s culture for more than 350 years, influencing social life, legislation and more, and she doesn’t see that going away anytime soon.
Since the introduction of mass-produced tea bags in the mid-20th century, Ms. Pettigrew said, “the whole romance of drinking tea and your connection to the tea you bought and drank has disappeared.”
But high-quality loose tea, like specialty coffee, is also having a moment, she says, as tea shops focusing on ethical production and environmentally conscious sourcing are popping up in Britain.
“There’s always been a sort of ‘Oh, tea is so boring,’ but it’s still a big part of our home drinking,” Ms Pettigrew said. “For so many years they’ve been saying, ‘Oh, coffee is so much more exciting and people are drinking more.’ And I’m not willing to accept that.”
At Oxford-based Cardews, which boasts of being the ‘oldest established supplier of freshly roasted coffee and fine teas in Oxford’, staff agreed that people were increasingly looking for coffee.
But tourists tended to look for something quintessentially British.
“We are often asked for our most English teas,” says Isaac Lloyd, who worked behind the counter. “And I have to gently tell them that this tea is not actually grown in England, even though we do have English blends.”
Mr Lloyd, 18, said he liked to guess whether a customer would buy tea or coffee, and that the divide was often between generations. But his colleague Charlie Jordan said people often surprised him.
“The ritual of making tea, a lot of people seem to really enjoy it,” noted Mr. Jordan, 28, and that applies to all ages.
Mr Lloyd interjected with a laugh: ‘Most people just want whatever gets them out of bed quickest in the morning.’