As others have pointed out, “back in the day” covers a very long time. There wouldn’t be much overlap between the time when some communities had to drink beer instead of water, and the time when tea became popular. The “New River” aqueduct in London was built in 1613 and anyway most people in the countryside would have had clean wells to drink from. Furthermore, I believe the reason beer was more hygienic was that it required the water to be boiled, just like tea.
Tea gives you more than just a mild caffeine buzz. Popular British tea bags have more than 3g of tea in them - 2 of those will perk most people up. It doesn’t feel the same as 3 strong espresso shots, but drinking so much caffeine at once isn’t necessarily the cultural norm that people in 21st English speaking countries think it is.
Tea also gives you an additional buzz from theanine - I don’t think this is placebo as I realised there was something else affecting me before I looked up what it might be.
Both beer and tea require the water (which might look and smell reasonably clean) to be boiled. Beer is brewed by washing malt with boiling water.
There doesn’t have to be any specific decision to choose only drink beer or tea for known health reasons - dehydration, cholera, dysentry etc will exert selective pressure.
It appears that this did actually happen, though perhaps more limited in time and place than the popular imagination currently believes. From this museum website: “Why was ale important to Edinburgh?”
“Edinburgh ends up with a lack of fresh drinking water. In 1460, James III of Scotland had the marshy land below Edinburgh Castle flooded to provide extra defence. The “Nor Loch”, as it came to be known, quickly filled up with the sewage and waste of Edinburgh’s populace.”
So in this case it only happened towards the last few centuries of the medieval period in perhaps the most densely populated city in northern Europe. Edinburgh’s first aqueduct was then built in 1674.
Most cultures that drink tea also drink beer. They are not regarded as interchangeable commodities — the occasions for tea-drinking do not overlap signficantly with the occasions for beer-drinking.
The same, of course, is true to a substantial extent for beer and coffee.
The interchangeable commodities are tea and coffee. The societal preference for one over the other is a product of history and culture.
The OP starts with an assumption that tea was the basis of the East India Company’s power and wealth. Not really.; the Company’s revenue composition varied over time, but it was always some blend of land revenue, customs duties, salt tax, tributes and plunder, trading in opium, trading in cotton, trading in other goods. Land revenue depended indirectly on crop values and tea was a signficant crop, but all land was taxed, regardless of the crop.
The taxes were extortionate and represented a vast outflow of wealth from India to the UK (after 1958: to the UK exchequer). Tl;dr: the East India Company didn’t become rich by trading in tea, but by plundering India.
Also: much water from wells and much defecation used as fertilizer. And much smaller populations, more closely connected to water and land and so more cognizant of not pooping in your own nest. It’s in the 20th century that Tom Lehrer wrote,
If you visit American city,
You will find it very pretty.
Just two things of which you must beware:
Don’t drink the water and don’t breathe the air!
Lots of things there that you can drink,
But stay away from the kitchen sink!
The breakfast garbage that you throw into the Bay
They drink at lunch in San Jose.
And there are about 200 First Nations communities in Canada that have to boil their water before using, and have had to do so for years.
Beer was more often a choice, not a health precaution, though in some cases, as in Edinburgh, above, it was a short term fix.
Tea is one of those cash crops that results in clearcutting whatever else happens to be in the way. Much of the initial clearcutting of Uganda was by Indian immigrants during the British occupation for the planting of tea. The country has now lost 50% of its forests for cash crops. When we took a trip to the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest in the 90s, it was startling how few trees we saw until we approached the wall that is Bwindi. Coffee is the other big cash crop, and it actually now exceeds the export of tea.
I somewhat the impression the OP doesn’t enjoy tea so wonders if there is another reason for its popularity… when the simplest answer is that it tastes good to a lot of people. I really enjoy beer as well as coffee, but I also enjoy tea quite a bit (and just on a taste level, I prefer tea to coffee).
I like both, and on a pure taste level, it depends what else I’m eating, and the quality of the tea or coffee. But on a “it’s a great drug” level, i prefer tea. I think some of the other chemicals in tea (theobromine? theanine? something else?) must buffer the effects of the caffeine or something. At any rate, it’s fairly easy for me to over do coffee and just feel like my brain is rattling around in my head, and i can generally reach a good alertness level with tea without that risk. (And caffeinated soda is the riskiest for me. why yes, i am more sensitive to caffeine than average. But I’m not outside of the normal range or anything.)
Tea is unique in that it stimulates and relaxes at the same time. It also has much more caffeine than coffee drinkers think, but it doesn’t mess up the gut or make one’s breath stink like coffee does; it actually promotes oral health, when drank as is, without sweeteners / milk.
Green tea is the only caffeine drink I do, just under a liter per day the year round. It’s the perfect beverage, as far as I’m concerned. So, the question of why it became so popular doesn’t make much sense to me.
That’s part of the story. As it happens, coffee and tea were introduced to Britain at roughly the same time, in the mid-seventeenth-century, within a decade or so of each other. But they originally had very different social and gender connotations. Coffee was drunk in public coffee houses, which were more respectable than taverns etc. but very much public spaces and not especially suitable for respectable women. Tea, in contrast, was extremely expensive. So, it was initially favoured by very wealthy women, who used it as a way of socialising with female friends in their own homes. Only later, as the price fell, did the habit spread down the social scale.
Like you, I used to hate green tea, even with a sweetener, but since I discovered the health benefits I’ve switched over to green tea (nothing added) and now enjoy the taste of it. I will sometimes have an Earl Grey in the afternoon or evening (decaf) with some Stevia, but my go to tea is green tea most of the time.
I find green tea smoother and more pleasurable than black tea, for the most part. There’s something more “relaxing” about it to me than most black teas. (Though I like some of the aggressive black tea like lapsang souchang, which is a smoked tea, and definitely not for everyone.) And matcha is just the bomb.