Why Tea/Coffee?

Coffee (Genus: Coffea L.) and tea (Genus: Camellia L.) are popular beverages. The coffee plant is endemic to the horn of Africa, specifically Ethiopia, while the tea plant grows wild on the foothill slopes of Southeast Asia, specifically Southern parts of China and Eastern India. Both beverages owe their popularity to their ability to stimulate and invigorate. This ability is based on certain active ingredients such as caffeine, catechins and others that tea leaves and coffee beans possess. These ingredients increase metabolic rates, which in turn, tend to stimulate dormant senses and reinvigorate tired ones. This is only one effective mechanism, though a principal one, that these ingredients initiate to invigorate the human body. Such mechanisms that tealeaves and coffee beans initiate in the human body to stimulate it are diverse and complex and not all are known. Nevertheless, this is a synopsis and a detailed study of such mechanisms must be left to literature with greater scope than this.

Tea or coffee in the morning to begin the day with on an alert note is just as appropriate as tea or coffee taken at the end of a very tiring session of work to revitalize the senses, whether that session is in the middle of the day or late at night.
Both coffee and tea have been used traditionally in their native lands for thousands of years. The Chinese have been using tea in traditional medicine and as an invigorating drink well before the birth of Christ. The Indians of the eastern parts of the country have also been, for a long time, drinking tea with spices and milk. The native Ethiopians also have used coffee traditionally as a medicinal ingredient before the birth of Christ.
Both tea and coffee, as beverages, were dispersed from their traditional areas to other parts of the world. Coffee, initially, became predominantly a South and Central American crop tea while consumption patterns favored European and North American countries. Presently, this bias in cultivation towards the Americas has been much corrected and large acreages of coffee plants are evident in favorable parts of Asia and Africa, the last being the plant's native continent. Tea remained an important cultivated crop in its native lands - India and China - while its usage spread gradually to the rest of the world. The history of tea and coffee is, almost in essence, a very significant part of the continuing history of humankind's search for tranquility and well being in solitude and in company!

Initially, both beverages were drunk in the West without many frills. The average European or North American drank tea or coffee straight - black or with milk and with or without sugar. Later, especially in the 20th century, this simple trend continued to change to more adventurous practices. At the very beginning of this beverage-wise exciting century exotic coffee and tea based drinks, some recently concocted and others with ancient recipes filched from their native lands, have flooded world markets and each such drink, no matter how quixotic, has considerably countable aficionados in numerous countries. Green tea, black tea, oolong tea, iced teas, elderberry teas, blueberry teas, espresso coffee, mocha coffee, frappuccino coffee, latte coffee, machiatto coffee - the names roll on!

Tea and coffee drinking is not only a personally exhilarating experience but also a socially expressive one. The elaborate Japanese ceremony of cha-no-yu (Way of Tea), conducted properly, signifies the host's grace in serving and the guest's delicacy in accepting. It is an exquisite social act that functions both as an identifier and as a denominator of the participating individuals. The bedou of the Arabian Desert take care to soften the rigors of desert travel by serving guests at their tents with innumerable cups of darkly brewed coffee. Such intricate social etiquettes governing the practice of drinking tea and coffee are almost as various as the variety of humankind on planet Earth!

Lastly, the bewilderingly multitudinous sets of geographical location, climatic conditions, seasonal weather conditions, cultivars, planting, growing and harvesting techniques, production processes and even, presently, marketing and serving techniques that generate the innumerable types of tea and coffee beverages available in the world market today make for tea/coffee to be things to be done!

So! It is not only that tea/coffee invigorate the average human that they are so popular! Instead, in all their variety tea/coffee continue to be attitudes that are traditional. Like clothing, hairdos, shoes and other human appurtenances that have been expressing human attitudes for centuries tea/coffee drinking styles also change with the times, preserving the human essence of being with it - living in with the times! And they remain, in that essence, still what may be done - and what may be seen being done!

Reference Note: The information contained in this article are generalized and freely available everywhere.

Reference:

Generic names for the tea and coffee plants are derived from: The "Integrated Taxonomic Information System" (ITIS). Accessed on 10th July, 2009, at: http://www.itis.gov/