Tea has suffered in its bid to remain popular: Book

New Delhi, Aug 17 (PTI) As tea has become modern, it hasbeen reduced to a dependable but superficial experience inwhich the beverage is of average quality at best resulting inan overwhelming disaster, says a new book. ‘Empire of Tea: The Asian Leaf that Conquered the World’by Markman Ellis, Matthew Mauger and Richard Coulton exploreshow the British ‘way of tea’ became the norm across theerstwhile British Empire. In the last half century, tea has become increasinglypopular around the world, and increasingly the subject ofglobal multinational business systems. "As tea has become modern, it has become quotidian andimmiserated. Tea has been reduced to a dependable butsuperficial experience in which the beverage is of averagequality at best. "The hot drinks industry has worked hard to discipline teainto a branded consumption experience; corporate tea is aconsistently dark and strongly flavoured liquor, its dullyunvarying flavour profile repeated time after time," theauthors say. According to them, this "recipe has been overwhelminglysuccessful for the producers but is has also been anoverwhelming disaster for tea itself, which has had tosacrifice much in order to remain so popular". Furthermore, they say, although tea companies areprofitable, they operate in mature markets with little roomfor growth. "The tea industry is beginning to recognise thisconundrum. Its analysis indicates that to make more money, itneeds to educate consumers, to reconnect them with wider anddeeper practices of tea drinking and with knowledge abouttea’s history," the book, published by Speaking Tiger, says. Tea became a defining symbol of British identity in aperiod when it all came from China and Japan: it was not until1839 that the first ‘Empire’ tea from Assam found its way tothe London markets. So although the history of Britain’s obsession with tea isoften associated in the popular imagination with the19th-century plantations of colonial India and the dramaticraces between tea clippers, these aspects of its story werethe effect – rather than the cause – of the widespread demandfor tea, the authors say. "Moreover it was Britain’s appetite for this Asian leafthat led to its international adoption among its formercolonies, becoming by one measure the worldÂ’s most popularbeverage after water. Victorian Britain was an ’empire oftea’, but it was also a territory that had been conquered bytea during the preceding 150 years," they write. MORE PTI ZMNANS