Tea Is not Sexy!
An Interview With Bill Gorman
By Ian Boughton

The British attitude to tea remains a mystery in many parts of the world. And to those who are mystified by the way Britain does things, it will be equally puzzling to wonder why, in the country seen as the tea-drinking center of the world, an entity like the Tea Council needs to work so hard to promote the drink to the general public.
   Bill Gorman has answers for these questions. He is chairman of both the Tea Council and the Tea Guild. In his Council capacity, Gorman is responsible for telling the story of tea to the public, and representing the major tea-producing countries in the United Kingdom. For the Tea Guild, he works to recognize those people who are doing amazing work in actually serving the drink to customers in vastly varied places across Britain.
   Like many things British, these organizations sound monolithic, but are in fact rather fluid. The Council began sometime in the 1960s as a partnership between British importers and the exporting countries, who were at the time still regarded as “former colonies.” It was originally intended to be a political voice and technical resource, but almost immediately found itself successfully addressing such issues as child labor. The Tea Guild, with a membership of 90 elite shops, recognizes excellence and gives the industry an unofficial sense of what that means.
   The Ritz and Dorchester hotels are Tea Guild members, but so are wonderful independent tearoom operators running far smaller businesses all over Britain. To recognize their efforts, the Guild bestows the Top Tea Place awards, the Top Afternoon Tea award, the Top Country House Hotel Tea award, and it publishes superbly detailed guides to tea places throughout Britain.
   Gorman is enthusiastic in his admiration of what these independent operators do. “Supporting them is not very difficult,” he says. “The vast majority have a vision of their location, their crockery, their tea, their staff attitude, their greeting of people. There is already a vast amount of passion there, and sometimes all they need in the way of support is a gentle nudge.”
   Typically, he was vastly impressed when he went to judge the work of Margaret Bacon, who runs a gloriously English roses-round-the-door cottage teahouse in rural Norfolk, on the east coast.
   “I arrived unannounced, and realized immediately that she had got everything right,” Gorman recalls. “There was a warm welcome and a wonderful range of teas, all prepared to perfection. And when I found out that the lady is up at 4 a.m. every morning to bake all the cakes and pastries, it reminded me of all the other Tea Guild members who are so passionate about what they are doing.”
   Such is the traditional image of the British tea market, kept proudly alive by a small army of dedicated operators. But what Gorman and the Tea Council have also been doing in recent years is to gently heighten the British public’s awareness of their national drink. Instead of taking it for granted, the British have now come to appreciate it more.
   The Tea Council has just come to the end of a low-key but extremely successful campaign in Britain, in which tea was carefully associated over a couple of years with celebrities and high-profile people from the fashion and acting worlds. The climax of the campaign was a project in which many celebrities were invited to hand-paint teacups and saucers for an auction in support of a cancer-relief charity.
   The event achieved a remarkably high profile and much press coverage, as well as a vast windfall for the charity. Top prize went to Kylie Minogue’s signed cup at £1290 ($2300) while a Stella McCartney cup ornately designed in the Union Jack went for £630 ($1131).
   “This was a successful period in shifting the image of tea,” observes Gorman. “Tea is still in modest decline, but it is a decline which has slowed dramatically.
   “Tea is going through a renaissance in terms of image. We hear fewer people say tea is ‘old-fashioned,’ and more say it is ‘sophisticated.’ This has happened to the degree that the Ritz has now gone to four sittings of afternoon tea, because the demand is so enormous. It is no longer possible in London to walk off the street into a top hotel for afternoon tea without a reservation.”
   At the same time, the Tea Council has closely watched the British public’s growing appreciation of tea as a healthy drink.
   “One particular analysis we have done shows the impact of it. We did a ‘three-wave’ analysis to monitor the change in attitudes towards tea, and we can see that in the early stages of research, people didn’t think tea could be part of their rehydration routine, but now they mention it.
   “There is also a much greater appreciation of the different ways in which tea and coffee deliver caffeine. Last year, 28 percent of people understood that tea has less caffeine than coffee. Now the figure is 60 percent.”
   The Council has also maneuvered tea into the position of being a ‘useful’ drink for several sectors of the population. “A number of the things we have done in recent years have put tea into a different place in people’s minds.
   Anybody above forty has a high per capita consumption, perhaps five or six cups a day. Teenagers aren’t touching it, because it ain’t cool. But young women certainly are. The issues of calories and health are something they understand, but they have many contradictions in their lives. In Britain, these are people who want the perfect body, but can’t be bothered to go to the gym, and still want to go out for a drink on a Friday night.
   “For the rest of the time, they see tea as being a fine thing to drink. It is in the British psyche that tea helps us, and no other beverage has that effect.”
   Health is, for Gorman, a touchy subject. As a spokesperson for tea on health issues, he is keenly aware of the limits of scientific claims. Twenty years ago, he tells me, there were three or four scientific papers on tea each year. Now there are hundreds, most of which come from around the world and pile up on his desk. Still, quantity is not consensus. “Non-scientifically, we know the body takes in a great deal of rubbish every day, and we need good things to clean it out,” he says. “It is the Tea Council’s job to translate all this into soft science for the layman. But where are we in the evolution for tea as a science? We’re in exactly the same place as fruit and vegetables—there is no clinically definitive word. What we have is an enormous, staggeringly large body of opinion and empirical evidence saying that populations who have a sensible diet involving fruit, vegetables and tea, who engage in sensible exercise, are making a positive contribution to their own health.”
   That is enough, apparently, to establish tea as a healthy option. Social shifts are also helping to build demand.
   “There is also an interesting move towards afternoon tea as the focus for business meetings,” Gorman observes. “It has been realized that the business lunch, with alcohol flowing, changes the nature of a meeting. The alcohol makes everyone finish up at a different place, whereas with tea, everybody starts and finishes in a more rational state of mind.”
   Remarkably, for all the publicity and promotion given to modern drinks described as ‘tea,’ the British market is still dominated to a quite phenomenal degree by black tea drunk hot, with milk, and very often with sugar. The market is worth $1.2 billion, of which only $70 million is in specialty teas. That figure is growing at five percent a year, but is still very small. Green tea, for all the promotion and advertising behind it, has only two percent of the market.
   A tea importer has expressed a theory about why the Brits drink tea the way they do, and his idea questions the whole idea of British tea being a drink for the weak and the womenfolk.
   It is possible that a taste for a strong hot drink came from coffee, which had arrived in Britain first. However, at the height of the British empire, the country was keen to encourage imports from its dominions, of which the biggest was India, and so great quantities of black tea began arriving at the British ports.
   At exactly the same time, the British empire-builders were also investing heavily in Caribbean sugar estates. The two products came into Britain, where it was discovered that sugared strong tea provided the daily intake of calories for the working manual laborer. It was, however, astringent to the taste, so milk was added. The habit has remained to this day, and to a Brit, ‘a cup of tea’ means a black tea from India or perhaps China, brewed at boiling point, served only slightly lower, and cooled with cold milk.
   “Tea came in at a time when our water had to be boiled before drinking,” Gorman notes. “Gin and beer were the standard drinks at work breaks, and tea was sold through the apothecaries. The maids in the big houses used to steal the used tea-leaves and use them to make a perfectly good tea for the under-stairs staff [the servants].” I recall seeing antique tea-caddies with locks, allowing the lady of the house to lock her fresh tea away from her domestic staff.
   Iced tea is a relative rarity in Britain, and this has nothing to do with the notorious English climate. One of the natural curiosities of the tea plant is that when the leaves are treated with scalding hot water, and occasionally with heated milk, the result is a drink which refreshes. It is noticeable that in the hottest parts of India, the people do not drink cold drinks, they drink hot black tea, often with heated milk. It seems crazy in such a temperature, but it is the right thing for the body to take in a hot climate.
   It is not just habit which keeps the ‘specialty’ sector low in Britain. There is, in Britain, a difference of opinion about what ‘specialty’ tea means. Part of the trade considers the word to mean specific teas from specific origins and estates, but also to include treated teas such as Lapsang Souchongs and Earl Greys. Other suppliers and caterers group all kinds of unusual drinks under the ‘specialty’ heading, including rooibos, herbal drinks, fruit infusions and many things which borrow the name ‘tea,’ even though there is no actual tea in them.
   Such drinks are not part of the Tea Council’s effort.
   “Our challenge,” agrees Bill Gorman, “is to get people to understand that Camellia sinensis is the one which both tastes good, and does you the world of good.”
   Is the British way of drinking tea expanding to the rest of the world, or is it still seen as a quaint custom?
   “There are British companies selling a lot of tea to America,” observes Bill Gorman. “The Americans have wonderful locations, and wonderful coffee rooms which in turn make fabulous tearooms.
   “The Americans also have an appreciation of elegance and the finer things in life, and there is nothing finer than afternoon tea, with the accompanying elegance of cakes and scones. You don’t get anything like that with coffee!”
   However, he warns, tea must be treated respectfully.
   “If tea is re-energized with freshly drawn water, at a scalding temperature, the leaf repays this kindness with a great drink. Treat tea properly, and you will be able to charge more for it, and people will come back to you.
   “It’s as easy as that. Tea does not pretend to be something it isn’t: it’s not sexy, it’s not cool, it’s honest!
   “Tea is never going to be sexy—but tea will always be modern.”

Ian Boughton is publisher of Boughton’s Coffee House, a leading British publication devoted to the specialty coffee industry. He can be reached at Ianb@aol.com.