We Asked Some Experts How to Make Drinking Tea Cool Again

Illustration by Oliver Holmes

Tea. It's our national drink. More British than subtle xenophobia and only having sex when you're drunk. But this week, a study revealed that – for the first time – we now drink twice as much coffee as tea, with tea consumption falling by 19 percent since 2010.

Coffee popularity has soared, thanks in part to the rise of "coffee culture": people bringing their Aeropress into the office, little hearts drawn in your latte foam, "organic" espressos that taste like throwing up a lime – that kind of thing. The regeneration of coffee didn't come from nowhere, though; it was a careful exercise in branding and marketing, transforming coffee from a workaday beverage you swig in a greasy spoon to a finessed premium product like fine wine or expensive cheese.

Could the same ever be done for tea? We asked a series of people with an obvious vested interest in the subject to find out whether or not tea can ever be as cool as coffee.

Coffee's cool. Tea's not. Coffee's got George Clooney and Jean Dujardin; tea's got Johnny Vegas and an unnecessarily condescending knitted monkey. Coffee is James Dean lethargically drawing on a Marlboro he's slipped out of the packet he keeps rolled up in the sleeve of his white T-shirt. Tea is a greying dad in a fleece sitting in his Volvo estate outside a school disco waiting for his daughter, winding down the window to unleash the sound of "Lifted" by the Lighthouse Family as she approaches with her friends.

So, yeah, coffee = cool. Tea = really not cool. That's the problem here. And perceptions aren't going to change unless something drastic is done. With a raft of "detox" brews such as Bootea and SkinnyMe recently coming on the market, it seems like an attempt has already been made to re-position tea as a healthy equivalent to coffee. The Diet Coke to coffee's delicious full-fat Coca-Cola, if you will.

But that's not going to work, I'm afraid. Nobody actually likes Diet Coke or really wants to drink it; it has a flavour similar to what I imagine ear infection spray would taste like. So it's clear what needs to be done here. We need to make tea SEXY.

There's only one person in the world capable of helping us achieve our goal right now: Justin Bieber. What we need to do is pay him to change his name to Justin Teaber – or, even better, JUSTDRINKIN TEABER. And then, for the next year, he will agree to carry a flask of tea with him wherever he goes, like a recently widowed Yorkshireman stomping through the Pennines in search of the stream where he caught his first fish. Every time a pap chases him down the road to record a mundane snippet for TMZ, Bieber (Teaber) will turn to them, raise his flask and politely ask, "Anyone for a brew?" in a really bad British accent.

The exposure is going to be OFF THE SCALE. Fuck KPIs – we need to be thinking in terms of VIPs here.

Coffee is the lubricant of our society: it's on the table as divorce papers are hashed out, hangovers fester and UN treaties are negotiated. But tea? You can't imagine anyone on the Security Council ordering a rooibos vanilla chai.

When would you ever order a tea? At home my cupboards are overflowing with Yogis, Pukkas and T2 samples, but I could never bring myself to order tea in a café. It shows a lack of conviction, sacrilege to the Kiwi barista who has their knees on the table pushing down an Aeropress.

Who can help make tea cool? First, we should consult Japan, whose people were the last to create a successful cool tea trend, with the rise in 2014 of the matcha lattes. Or call our friends over in Taiwan, who we can thank for the 2012 phenomena of bubble tea. I still line up for one in Chinatown because I like the sensation of the balls popping in my mouth, but I don't have many friends who will join me.

Maybe the reason tea has become less popular in Britain is because it is still marketed as a British drink, when actually it has nothing to do with this country. It doesn't even grow here. If tea's ever going to be cool, we need to go global.

Tea may not have the cool credentials of coffee quite yet, but it's fighting back. There are new speciality tea shops in London now, and they take their design inspiration from speciality coffee rather than stuffy tea shops. Tea's also innovating in the way it brews – last summer, cafes were awash with cold brew coffee; now we have cold brew tea, inspired by Japan. Speciality tea definitely has a future.

Do you know who the worst people in the world are? The worst people in the world – worse than street-spitters, or anyone over the age of 12 who plays games on their phone – are people who refer to a cup of tea as "a cuppa".

People who talk about "a nice cuppa" are largely – no, entirely – fuck-witted infants intent on living life in a bubble of cosiness. These are the people who think the vicar on Gogglebox is dead funny, actually. They eat choccy and drown their deep-rooted sorrows in bottle after bottle of vino. Sometimes they go for a boogie with their besties. They are lower than pond scum.

So how should tea rebrand itself? Extraordinary-renditioning anyone who uses the word "cuppa" would be a solid start.

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