What We Don't Know About Tea

Humans drink some coffee, but moreso, we drink tea. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization claims that tea is the world’s most-consumed beverage after water. Comparing the Statistia pages on tea and coffee, you’ll see 2025 global consumption estimates of 7.75 billion kg of tea and 7.47 billion kg of coffee – nearly the same by weight. But when you consider that a cup of tea uses around 2-5 grams of leaves, and a cup of coffee uses around 10-30 grams of beans, we collectively drink several times more servings of tea than coffee. (It’s even more than that when you consider that it’s common to re-steep the same tea leaves multiple times, but not to re-brew the same coffee grounds.)

Given the greater popularity of tea, do encyclopedic sources have more information about tea?

Nope! English Wikipedia spills 50% more ink on Coffee than Tea, despite the same citation density.

Maybe the English-language Wikipedia isn’t a good comparison because coffee is popular in the English-speaking world. What about in a language particularly associated with tea?

It’s even worse in Chinese, with 咖啡 229% longer than 茶.

But maybe this just reflects different editorial preferences for whoever maintains these pages. Perhaps most of the content is not in the ‘main’ article, but in other articles under that topic’s category listing. Well, PetScan shows the number of articles in a category on wikipedia (including within nested subcategories).

In English, the coffee category has 2x the article count as the tea category, but in Chinese, the reverse is true. Finally, we have a statistic where tea wins.

My point might be: it feels like tea is under-studied relative to coffee, and not only because English-speakers seem to prefer coffee.

Maybe there is more writing about coffee, because coffee is a stronger stimulant than tea? (Should we thus expect, e.g., amphetamines to have an outsized presence on Wikipedia relative to their consumption?)

But here is a question it seems no one can answer. Why don’t people make stronger tea – or weaker coffee? A serving of coffee uses ~5-10x more material by weight, and has ~2-5x more caffiene, than a serving of tea. But this isn’t due to some natural law. One could make a bolder tea with 8 grams of leaves, or a delicate coffee with 8 grams of beans. Why aren’t either of these normal?

Here is another confusing question. Look up Chinese tea preparation on YouTube. You’ll find demonstrations of ceremonial techniques like the gongfu method, using equipment like a gaiwan (small porcelain teapot). Here is a nice, relaxing video. But consuming tea this way takes a long time, like an hour. Surely this isn’t a daily habit for most of the world’s tea drinkers, with their jobs and kids and such. So how do they do it?

From the English Wikipedia page for Chinese tea:

However, when sipped as a daily beverage, Chinese people tend to use a special personal tea bottle, in which water is allowed to infuse with tea leaves for hours, and sipped continuously. This method, which is more prevalent in day-to-day Chinese life, involves the repeated use of the same tea leaves throughout the day.

How does the special personal tea bottle work? The page cites a book from 2010, but I don’t see much information online about this bottle or how it is used. If it infuses for hours, do they drink it at ambient temperature? How much tea do they typically add? Do they switch out the leaves partway through the day? I went to YouTube hoping for a representative demonstration, but I can’t find one.

For most of my adult life, tea has brought me joy and warmth, while coffee has given me nervous jitters and an unsettled stomach. Weak, diluted coffee doesn’t fix the problem for me. Third-wave coffee doesn’t fix the problem either. There seems to be more difference than just the amount of caffiene, as I can handle ~100 milligrams from (e.g.) a lot of diet coke. My partner prefers coffee but agrees that tea and coffee feel like “different drugs”. Is it the acidity? Is it the presence of psychoactive molecules other than caffiene? Tea contains L-theanine, but the evidence for L-theanine doing anything at all is sketchy.

Regardless, somehow, people around me prefer coffee. In a room full of people breaking fast with access to their beverage of choice, I’m often the only one drinking tea. There is a lot of coffee-specific culture in the USA, including edutaining YouTubers, and parodies of those YouTubers, that I’ll watch despite not even drinking coffee. There is some tea culture in the US, but not nearly as much – maybe 5-10% as much.

What gives?