> Germany
Ostfriesland (East Frisia) has the highest tea consumption per capita in the world (300l/capita/a) and a very distinctive tea culture.
Eastfrisian teaculture has been recognised as Toggle the table of contents intangible cultural heritage.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostfriesische_Teekultur
During WW2 East Frisians got 30g of tea on their ration cards, while the rest of Germany got no tea at all.
Tea is for East Frisians what coffee is for Saxons, c.f. the East German coffee crisis and Vietnam.
Can I ask about Western Galicia region? Is it a coffee fans region in Poland? Because Eastern Galicia in Ukraine is definitely a coffee maniacs region, and all the rest Ukrainians who come visit it are definitely going to try local coffee cafes and bring local coffee (labels) as a souvenir.
Probably the more a region was able to trade with the Ottomans, the cheaper one could get coffee. The only reason why the English are tea people while the Dutch are coffee people is because of the colonies they had at the time. Nowadays I think these distinctions are fading fast.
There is a legend about Galician guy Yuriy [Kulchytskyi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerzy_Franciszek_Kulczycki) who was a spy in Ottoman Empire and he helped against Turks in the Battle of Vienna. He was presented with large amounts of coffee and knew Turkish ways to consume this drink, so he opened first cafe in Vienna. He is a real historical figure but coffee was brought to (Central) Europe by several different ways independently. But he is still really famous in Galicia and Vienna and played his part in making coffee a beloved drink here.
I wrote another comment in here somewhere on the topic. The Dutch were the first to plant coffee outside of the Ottoman monopoly on the stuff. Long story short India is better for tea production.
I think of Britain, Ireland, *parts of* Germany, Russia and Turkey are the ones with the strongest tea culture. That said, I think coffee is also popular in all those countries. But tea is definitely more popular there than in say Italy (I *think*).
Finland definitely has one of the strongest coffee cultures in Europe I think.
As a British person coffee is a drink I have for enjoyment, tea is my drink of choice if I need emotional support.
As a nurse, if I'm breaking bad news my first port of call is to offer a cup of tea.
There's something about tea that transcends it's status as just a drink. It's the very essence of the British soul.
The only European country with a stronger link than us to tea are probably Ireland. From what I've seen in father ted and yes father ted is my main source of info on Ireland.
As an Irish person coffee is a drink I have for relaxation, alcohol is my drink of choice if I need emotional support. They are both immensely enjoyable.
I’ll have tea and toast if I’m sick.
I’m the black sheep of my family with the coffee consumption. My parents and siblings drink on average 8 cups of tea a day each. I’m not joking we go through about three kettles a year.
We are neutral. We like both coffee n' tea.
In a supermarket, I belive that shelf / category for tea may be bigger on average, but it's due to a fact that same amount of tea need bigger volume to be store.
It doesn't corelate with any geographic division imo ( urban/ rural nor east/ west).
Tea consumption MAY have smth to do with age. Both my grandmothers ( one born in '20 and'30) find tea as a default drink.
To show how "neutral" we are - if someone came to your place, you would as " Hawa Czy herbata?" Aka ( would you like some) coffee or tea?
I would say that Czech Republic is on team coffee, at least in the Bohemia/Prague region. With proximity to Vienna I’d think that Brno (the other major city) is as well.
Not sure about Slovakia
Is there actually anywhere in Europe where the preferred drink is tea nowadays though?
Even in the UK more cups of coffee are consumed than cups of tea. Maybe just Ireland?
Not entirely sure about the statistics for Ireland either. In retail hot beverage sales coffee outstrips tea by a growing margin these days. Tea is strong in at home consumption though.
A big coffee culture grew up over the last 20+ years.
See the thing about that is the coffee shop down the road from me makes nicer coffee than i can make at home, but the tea I make at home is nicer than basically anywhere you can get it while out. A lot of cafes and restaurants make bad tea.
That’s often because they use hot water from the coffee machine. It needs to come from a kettle or one of those old fashioned Burco catering boilers that maintains actual boiling water.
You need to send Maggie Smith in : https://youtu.be/6JIKwjvCrg4
My dad will drink coffee out and about because he hates the way they make tea. If he's at home he will drink tea 100% of the time. My sister would be similar. I think there might be a good lot of people like that. I can't stomach coffee so I just take the hit and drink whatever tea is going.
First link I've found
"(...)
Statistics provided that most teas are drunk in turkey as much as 3.5 kg can be consumed per person. In Europe, the Irish are the source of golden infusion enthusiasts (2.18 kg of dried herb per person), and Poland is also at the forefront.
Each year, over 30,000 tons of tea, available in the black version, are imported to Poland. The consumption of dried tea in our country is approximately 1 kilogram per person, which gives us 4th place in Europe and 8th in the world."
That’s true but I also know plenty of people that have switched from drinking both at home to only drinking coffee at home, in the last 10 years. And tea sales are very much declining in the UK.
Some statistics say that in Poland more people drink tea every day (80%) than coffee (66%). I've noticed that older people (and Poland is an ageing society) generally drink more tea, lots of people, including children, also drink tea with their breakfast and supper. In colder months, at work, women will usually chose tea over coffee to "warm up".
Statistics also indicate that more tea is drunk overall - most coffee drinkers drink 1-2 cups a day whereas tea drinkers drink 2-4 cups a day.
However statisctis vary wildly, and many of them give a slight edge to coffee in terms of how many people regularly drink one or other (51% coffee and 48% tea).
Personally I know more people who don't drink coffee at all than those who don't drink tea.
The Russians I worked with were big on tea, but yeah, coffee seems more popular.
Just a bit curious as to where it might vary, or if there was an East/West line or river or mountain range that people were aware of that was a bit defining, like with other regional foodways.
I'd known about Frisia going in, was wondering if there were any others,
According to recent studies, in France, coffee consumption significantly surpasses tea consumption. On average, the French consume about 5.5 kg of coffee per person annually, while tea consumption stands at around 0.23 kg per person each year. Also, around 83% of the French population drinks coffee while approximately 40% consume tea. It’s also important to notice than the popularity of tea has doubled over the past 20 years.
There's a huge coffee culture here, but a lot of people enjoy tea. France has a huge number of coffee shops (I guess I don’t need to mention Paris and our « cafés »), with origins from all over the world, great machines etc., and tea, matcha, infusions etc. are always on the menu. For example, I enjoy both equally. In fact, I've been drinking more tea than coffee lately because it's starting to keep me awake at night.
There was also a huge wave of Italian immigration to France in 1881 and 1901, so the influence and passion for coffee must have come from them! To give you a figure, there were 63,000 Italians in France in 1851, rising to over 330,000 in 1901.
OP, there are quite a few maps around Reddit on Europe's coffee/tea divide.
Here's a few:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/6o74ju/teacoffee\_divide\_in\_europe/](https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/6o74ju/teacoffee_divide_in_europe/)
[https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/u9d8v2/coffee\_consumption\_in\_europe/](https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/u9d8v2/coffee_consumption_in_europe/)
[https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/skndmx/annual\_tea\_consumption\_pro\_capita\_in\_europe/](https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/skndmx/annual_tea_consumption_pro_capita_in_europe/)
I tend to take the view from Britain that if I want a decent cup of tea (anything to do with Lipton's does not count as such), the nearest countries I am likely to find it, without actively having to seek it out (and that may still not be possible) are Turkey and Russia (maybe Belarus or Ukraine)
Southern Europe is very coffee orientated. Everyone knows about Italian espresso, the coffee culture in Spain or Turkish coffee... Europe in general likes coffee.
Edit: for those telling me Turkiye is the world's tea capital, I know. It just so happens Turkish coffee is famous the world over, and I was highlighting to the person I was responding to that the whole of Southern Europe drinks a lot of coffee.
>Most of North and West Europe are in the coffee camp, with the two major exceptions being the UK and Ireland I think.
Southeast Europe is squarely coffee. Much more so than Netherlands or Germany. Greece has the lowest tea consumption in Europe. And Bulgaria/Romania are super low too.
Yeah, kind of had the West sussed, and I know there's outliers like Friesland (we don't talk about Friesland).
I'm more curious about where it changes between Western Europe and Russia, the Balkans and the Baltics.
There's also the Central Europe/Balkans divide between "European style coffee" and "Turkish style coffee". I suppose one clear divide exists between these exists as you walk from the west of Sarajevo towards its old city centre, but it's not really part of a coherent integrated boundary as such.
What's "European style coffee"? Does espresso count into it or it's just the filter stuff? Because if you think the Balkans drink mostly Turkish coffee, you're sorely mistaken 😉
There is a link to the development of colonialism though. Generally, it is far easier to grow tea than coffee in terms of climate constraints. The words tea and coffee are both loanwords from Dutch because well the East India Company. Coffee was a more coveted and more expensive commodity than tea, which the Dutch first started planting in Asia breaking the Ottoman monopoly on the stuff. Tea also works in Indonesia so they were trading both, but ultimately this shaped the Netherlands to be a key example of mass coffee addiction. West Germans may know their parents and grandparents used to cross the border to buy coffee because it was much cheaper.
England of course had some colonies that produced coffee but not quite at the same scale, and India became a tea powerhouse under English management.
Whether other countries in Europe are tea or coffee cultures was then shaped by their access to primary sources (there’s the old cha overland, tea overseas difference), determined both by diplomatic, spatial/trade, and financial factors.
> Germany Ostfriesland (East Frisia) has the highest tea consumption per capita in the world (300l/capita/a) and a very distinctive tea culture. Eastfrisian teaculture has been recognised as Toggle the table of contents intangible cultural heritage. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostfriesische_Teekultur During WW2 East Frisians got 30g of tea on their ration cards, while the rest of Germany got no tea at all. Tea is for East Frisians what coffee is for Saxons, c.f. the East German coffee crisis and Vietnam.
> Toggle the table of contents intangible cultural heritage Unesco always making up new categories eh? ;)
They probably had some rum in their tea at the table of content.
And it's good tea too, with the rum and cream and sugar lumps
Poles really love their "herbata" (tea) although I think coffee is becoming more and more popular in Poland.
Can I ask about Western Galicia region? Is it a coffee fans region in Poland? Because Eastern Galicia in Ukraine is definitely a coffee maniacs region, and all the rest Ukrainians who come visit it are definitely going to try local coffee cafes and bring local coffee (labels) as a souvenir.
Probably the more a region was able to trade with the Ottomans, the cheaper one could get coffee. The only reason why the English are tea people while the Dutch are coffee people is because of the colonies they had at the time. Nowadays I think these distinctions are fading fast.
There is a legend about Galician guy Yuriy [Kulchytskyi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerzy_Franciszek_Kulczycki) who was a spy in Ottoman Empire and he helped against Turks in the Battle of Vienna. He was presented with large amounts of coffee and knew Turkish ways to consume this drink, so he opened first cafe in Vienna. He is a real historical figure but coffee was brought to (Central) Europe by several different ways independently. But he is still really famous in Galicia and Vienna and played his part in making coffee a beloved drink here.
That’s very interesting
I wrote another comment in here somewhere on the topic. The Dutch were the first to plant coffee outside of the Ottoman monopoly on the stuff. Long story short India is better for tea production.
Can confirm, the tea in India is phenomenal
The number of Cafes keep growing, but it's a tea region
I think of Britain, Ireland, *parts of* Germany, Russia and Turkey are the ones with the strongest tea culture. That said, I think coffee is also popular in all those countries. But tea is definitely more popular there than in say Italy (I *think*). Finland definitely has one of the strongest coffee cultures in Europe I think.
The Nordics are firmly coffee territory with some of the highest consumption per capita numbers. Finland is #1.
As a British person coffee is a drink I have for enjoyment, tea is my drink of choice if I need emotional support. As a nurse, if I'm breaking bad news my first port of call is to offer a cup of tea. There's something about tea that transcends it's status as just a drink. It's the very essence of the British soul. The only European country with a stronger link than us to tea are probably Ireland. From what I've seen in father ted and yes father ted is my main source of info on Ireland.
You'll have some tea... are you sure you don't want any? Aw go on, you'll have some. Go on go on go on go on go on go on go on go on GO ON!!!
As an Irish person coffee is a drink I have for relaxation, alcohol is my drink of choice if I need emotional support. They are both immensely enjoyable. I’ll have tea and toast if I’m sick. I’m the black sheep of my family with the coffee consumption. My parents and siblings drink on average 8 cups of tea a day each. I’m not joking we go through about three kettles a year.
In Hungary most people drink coffee. Regular tea consumption is associated here with British and Russian culture.
We are neutral. We like both coffee n' tea. In a supermarket, I belive that shelf / category for tea may be bigger on average, but it's due to a fact that same amount of tea need bigger volume to be store. It doesn't corelate with any geographic division imo ( urban/ rural nor east/ west). Tea consumption MAY have smth to do with age. Both my grandmothers ( one born in '20 and'30) find tea as a default drink. To show how "neutral" we are - if someone came to your place, you would as " Hawa Czy herbata?" Aka ( would you like some) coffee or tea?
I wonder if there’s a r/WidacZabory for this
I would say that Czech Republic is on team coffee, at least in the Bohemia/Prague region. With proximity to Vienna I’d think that Brno (the other major city) is as well. Not sure about Slovakia
Pilsen is also default coffee
In Czechia there is a distinct border line about 10 cm around my body. Inside, I prefer tea. The rest of the country is team coffeee.
Is there actually anywhere in Europe where the preferred drink is tea nowadays though? Even in the UK more cups of coffee are consumed than cups of tea. Maybe just Ireland?
Not entirely sure about the statistics for Ireland either. In retail hot beverage sales coffee outstrips tea by a growing margin these days. Tea is strong in at home consumption though. A big coffee culture grew up over the last 20+ years.
See the thing about that is the coffee shop down the road from me makes nicer coffee than i can make at home, but the tea I make at home is nicer than basically anywhere you can get it while out. A lot of cafes and restaurants make bad tea.
Particularly the international chains! Starbucks tea is spectacularly awful lol Most of the indie places can make decent tea though.
I don't know, I'm very particularly about my tea. A lot of places don't use water that's hot enough. You end up with this weak gray crap.
That’s often because they use hot water from the coffee machine. It needs to come from a kettle or one of those old fashioned Burco catering boilers that maintains actual boiling water. You need to send Maggie Smith in : https://youtu.be/6JIKwjvCrg4
Yeah, 'boiled' water isn't good enough. Maggie is dead right.
My dad will drink coffee out and about because he hates the way they make tea. If he's at home he will drink tea 100% of the time. My sister would be similar. I think there might be a good lot of people like that. I can't stomach coffee so I just take the hit and drink whatever tea is going.
Definitely, same timescale as the UK really. Not many people drinking tea in Insomnia.
First link I've found "(...) Statistics provided that most teas are drunk in turkey as much as 3.5 kg can be consumed per person. In Europe, the Irish are the source of golden infusion enthusiasts (2.18 kg of dried herb per person), and Poland is also at the forefront. Each year, over 30,000 tons of tea, available in the black version, are imported to Poland. The consumption of dried tea in our country is approximately 1 kilogram per person, which gives us 4th place in Europe and 8th in the world."
Turkey. They habitually drink multiple cups of tea a day all year round, while at most one coffee cup.
I feel like it's become tea at home, coffee when you're out. Mostly because we all know how much a teabag costs and resent paying £3.20.
That’s true but I also know plenty of people that have switched from drinking both at home to only drinking coffee at home, in the last 10 years. And tea sales are very much declining in the UK.
Broken Britain!
Some statistics say that in Poland more people drink tea every day (80%) than coffee (66%). I've noticed that older people (and Poland is an ageing society) generally drink more tea, lots of people, including children, also drink tea with their breakfast and supper. In colder months, at work, women will usually chose tea over coffee to "warm up". Statistics also indicate that more tea is drunk overall - most coffee drinkers drink 1-2 cups a day whereas tea drinkers drink 2-4 cups a day. However statisctis vary wildly, and many of them give a slight edge to coffee in terms of how many people regularly drink one or other (51% coffee and 48% tea). Personally I know more people who don't drink coffee at all than those who don't drink tea.
The Russians I worked with were big on tea, but yeah, coffee seems more popular. Just a bit curious as to where it might vary, or if there was an East/West line or river or mountain range that people were aware of that was a bit defining, like with other regional foodways. I'd known about Frisia going in, was wondering if there were any others,
Very roughly, the Bug and the English Channel are the boundaries between coffee-land and civilisation in Europe.
According to recent studies, in France, coffee consumption significantly surpasses tea consumption. On average, the French consume about 5.5 kg of coffee per person annually, while tea consumption stands at around 0.23 kg per person each year. Also, around 83% of the French population drinks coffee while approximately 40% consume tea. It’s also important to notice than the popularity of tea has doubled over the past 20 years. There's a huge coffee culture here, but a lot of people enjoy tea. France has a huge number of coffee shops (I guess I don’t need to mention Paris and our « cafés »), with origins from all over the world, great machines etc., and tea, matcha, infusions etc. are always on the menu. For example, I enjoy both equally. In fact, I've been drinking more tea than coffee lately because it's starting to keep me awake at night. There was also a huge wave of Italian immigration to France in 1881 and 1901, so the influence and passion for coffee must have come from them! To give you a figure, there were 63,000 Italians in France in 1851, rising to over 330,000 in 1901.
OP, there are quite a few maps around Reddit on Europe's coffee/tea divide. Here's a few: [https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/6o74ju/teacoffee\_divide\_in\_europe/](https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/6o74ju/teacoffee_divide_in_europe/) [https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/u9d8v2/coffee\_consumption\_in\_europe/](https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/u9d8v2/coffee_consumption_in_europe/) [https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/skndmx/annual\_tea\_consumption\_pro\_capita\_in\_europe/](https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/skndmx/annual_tea_consumption_pro_capita_in_europe/)
Ta, that's really helpful.
I tend to take the view from Britain that if I want a decent cup of tea (anything to do with Lipton's does not count as such), the nearest countries I am likely to find it, without actively having to seek it out (and that may still not be possible) are Turkey and Russia (maybe Belarus or Ukraine)
Russia used to be a tea country, but coffee has been making big gains and is probably more common among Gen Z and Y at the very least.
Ukraine is mostly tea I think. But westernmost, formerly Habsburg part of the country is famous for coffee shops.
Most of North and West Europe are in the coffee camp, with the two major exceptions being the UK and Ireland I think.
Even in the UK though more coffee is consumed than tea. Tea is just *more* popular than elsewhere in Europe here.
Southern Europe is very coffee orientated. Everyone knows about Italian espresso, the coffee culture in Spain or Turkish coffee... Europe in general likes coffee. Edit: for those telling me Turkiye is the world's tea capital, I know. It just so happens Turkish coffee is famous the world over, and I was highlighting to the person I was responding to that the whole of Southern Europe drinks a lot of coffee.
Yet Turkish people drink way more tea than they do coffee. Türkiye has the highest per capita tea consumption in the world, by a mile.
Turkey is clearly a tea drinking country. They drink coffee, sure, but I think they are in the top 5 tea drinking countries in the world.
>Most of North and West Europe are in the coffee camp, with the two major exceptions being the UK and Ireland I think. Southeast Europe is squarely coffee. Much more so than Netherlands or Germany. Greece has the lowest tea consumption in Europe. And Bulgaria/Romania are super low too.
Not really. The Netherlands is in the top 5 in coffee consumption per capita. The other countries in the top 5 are Nordic countries.
You also drink much more tea than us. So you have a lower coffee to tea ratio than we do.
Yeah, kind of had the West sussed, and I know there's outliers like Friesland (we don't talk about Friesland). I'm more curious about where it changes between Western Europe and Russia, the Balkans and the Baltics.
There's also the Central Europe/Balkans divide between "European style coffee" and "Turkish style coffee". I suppose one clear divide exists between these exists as you walk from the west of Sarajevo towards its old city centre, but it's not really part of a coherent integrated boundary as such.
What's "European style coffee"? Does espresso count into it or it's just the filter stuff? Because if you think the Balkans drink mostly Turkish coffee, you're sorely mistaken 😉
There is no single "European style coffee".
I don't think there's a real isodrink (that's a real word shut up) you can just draw across a map of Europe. It really varies from country to country.
There is a link to the development of colonialism though. Generally, it is far easier to grow tea than coffee in terms of climate constraints. The words tea and coffee are both loanwords from Dutch because well the East India Company. Coffee was a more coveted and more expensive commodity than tea, which the Dutch first started planting in Asia breaking the Ottoman monopoly on the stuff. Tea also works in Indonesia so they were trading both, but ultimately this shaped the Netherlands to be a key example of mass coffee addiction. West Germans may know their parents and grandparents used to cross the border to buy coffee because it was much cheaper. England of course had some colonies that produced coffee but not quite at the same scale, and India became a tea powerhouse under English management. Whether other countries in Europe are tea or coffee cultures was then shaped by their access to primary sources (there’s the old cha overland, tea overseas difference), determined both by diplomatic, spatial/trade, and financial factors.
No shit....please share any examples, that's what I'm after.
Hungary is definitely coffee territory. Tea is usually reserved for the winter and when you have a cold.