Tea comes to the new world
Europeans, in particular the British, began to learn about organic tea through the travels of Dutch explorers who also introduced American colonists to organic tea in the mid-1600s. The British brought tea bushes (some would say they "stole the secret of tea" from the Chinese) to India, in the early 1800s. Starting in Assam, in Northeastern India, organic tea began to flourish in India. From Assam, English planters (the "Britishers" as they were called in India) moved tea down the coast to Nilgiri and, most famously, to Darjeeling at the foothills of the Himalayas.
Tea moved to Ceylon (now called Sri Lanka) in the 1860s. Although we equate the word "Ceylon" with tea today, Ceylon was a coffee producing island until a blight wiped out every plant on the island. The Britishers found that tea could flourish where coffee would not.
Tea became so popular by the 1700s that the British Parliament imposed a duty on tea and other goods imported into the British American colonies, which later resulted in a boycott of British imports and frequent smuggling in of Dutch teas. A few years later the protest of British tea taxes leads to the "Boston Tea Party", where disguised colonists raided British ships of tea and tossed about 45 tons of tea into the Boston Harbor. After several British attempts to end the taxation protests, the American Revolution begins.
The 1800s brought advancement to the tea trade and growth of teas popularity. The discovery of indigenous Indian tea plants expanded tea cultivating regions as well as the introduction of tea, imported from India and China to Sri Lanka (Ceylon). American clipper ships speeded up tea transports to America and Europe, making tea that much more accessible and economical as a common drinking practice and creating the need for larger tea companies and stores. In the 1900s, tea, in particular green tea, became just as popular and widely consumed as coffee, especially with the introduction of iced tea at the 1904 St. Louis World Fair and the invention of individual tea bags.
