Coffee or Tea?

Ladies and gentlemen, brew your beverages.

I thought I’d try tackling the centuries-long debate over which drink is the best: coffee or tea. I drink both, so I’ll try to evaluate them on an even-handed basis. Before I do that, however, I want to examine the strange, exciting and possibly true history of the coffee-tea debate.

Most people probably think, if they stopped to think about it, that the rift really opened up between coffee and tea with the American Revolutionary War, and the first act of commercial terrorism on American soil. I say soil, but water would be more accurate, as the terrorist act I’m referencing is, of course, the Boston Tea Party, where crates of tea were dumped into Boston Harbor. After that, a lot of the revolutionaries switched to drinking coffee, as a sign of defiance against the British and their oppressive taxes. And thus the great coffee-tea war entered the modern era.

First of all, there are both tea-drinkers and coffee-drinkers that give both beverages a bad name. For coffee, it’s the people who drink those drinks that are half milk, half sugar-syrup, and containing only trace amounts of coffee. Now, there’s nothing wrong with drinking and enjoying those drinks – they can be pretty tasty. It’s the people who think those drinks count as coffee that are the problem. Those drinks may be good, but they’re not qualified to be called coffee. For tea, it’s a less marked difference. Those chai tea lattes: tasty, maybe a little pretentious, but overall okay. However, it worries me that people just drink that and claim to like tea. To me, chai tea lattes don’t taste like anything that resembles the rest of the body of tea, due to the extra spices and additional flavors in it. Tasty, but if you only drink that and claim to like all tea, you’re jumping to conclusions.

Besides taste, there are some differences between coffee and tea. While both of the beverages do contain caffeine, a brewed cup of tea contains less caffeine than a cup of coffee.

There are some differences in perception as well when it comes to tea: Tea is generally viewed as higher-class, as evidenced by high tea and other such events. Personally, I don’t think that, but whatever works for people.

To be honest, it’s really all down to personal preference when it comes to coffee and tea. One drink probably isn’t “better” than the other. I take my coffee black, no sugar, and my tea, usually an Irish or English breakfast tea, with one sugar.