Why English Breakfast Tea Hasn't Caught On in America

If you pay attention to the portions of the internet that deal a lot with international travel and cultural differences, and if you watch for patterns, certain questions emerge. This is one of the lesser ones, but it's persistent: British people come to America, and they go to the grocery store and find the tea aisle, and they look for the specific teas that they are used to buying at home. This usually includes something called English Breakfast, and they don't always find it. Why, they want to know, is such an important staple tea so uncommon here?

There's some history that's worth knowing here, and I'll talk about that, but first I want to focus on the present situation. First of all, English Breakfast tea is available here, but it's one of several hundred named teas. It has to compete not only with such old standby teas as Constant Comment, but also with the explosion of flavors we've seen in the tea aisle in recent decades. If you go to any large grocery store (say, Meijer) and find the tea aisle, you're going to see hundreds of shelf-feet of different teas, ranging from the mundane (three or four different orange teas, three or four different lemon teas, three or four mint teas, chamomile, ...) to the peculiar.

Some of the most peculiar teas that you will find on the American grocery store shelf belong to a category that I am going to call gift teas. As far as I know, no one else calls them that, but the only time I have ever seen these sorts of tea, other than on the store shelf, was when they were purchased by one person and given to another. Rather than trying to formally define the category, I'm just going to give a couple of examples, and hopefully the idea will become clear.

I was once given a box of tea for Christmas, the exact name of which I no longer recall, but it had Christmas in it. It might have been something like Christmas Brunch or Country Christmas, or some similarly vague holiday-themed name. It was a flavored black tea, meaning that someone took ordinary black tea and added flavors to it. (This in itself is not odd. The aforementioned Constant Comment is a flavored black tea, and it's perfectly normal and reasonable and good.) Unfortunately, I don't remember the exact list of flavors it had in it: there were at least six, and I'm certain that almond and cherry were among them. If it had just been an almond and cherry flavored black tea, that might have been good, but there were several other flavors as well, and it just came out as a muddle. I only ever made one cup of it, which I didn't finish.

My mom currently has in her cupboard a box of Sugar Cookie Sleigh Ride, which was, of course, also a gift. It's an herbal blend containing, again, at least half a dozen different flavors. Among them are, I swear on Dave Barry's soul that I am not making this up, thistle and barley. It's been in the cupboard for at least a year. It was a gift, and you can't throw away a gift. Realistically, nobody's ever going to drink it.

Given the existence of these sorts of teas, with vague, non-flavor-related names, can you begin to get a picture of why Americans see English Breakfast tea and don't immediately think that sounds good, we should try that. Frankly, most Americans are more likely to buy this product for someone they know who is planning a trip to England, than for themselves. Oh, you're interested in England? Well, here you go, here's a gift tea that has England in its name, so even if it's no bloody good, you'll know that I was thinking about you and what your interests are. It's the thought that counts, right? And no, to preempt an obvious question, I don't think most Americans are aware that English Breakfast tea is a thing in England. We get lots of things here that purport to be of various national origins and in fact are not. Why should this English tea we've never heard of before be different? The only way people are going to know otherwise, is if they see British people talking about it on the internet. Which, admittedly, is now possible.

I've glossed over something, though: how is it that Americans have not previously heard of English Breakfast tea?

The really weird thing is, if you look up the history of English Breakfast tea, it is believed to be of American origin. Well, the name, English Breakfast is believed to be of American origin, though it's hard to be quite certain of the particulars. As odd as it may seem, this is a clue. It is worth noting that the blend that went by that name in nineteenth-century America, is not the same blend that goes by that name in England now. In fact, it appears to have been composed of teas imported from China. (The British English Breakfast tea is, according to Wikipedia, made of teas from India, Sri Lanka, and Africa.) Why is this relevant? The thing is, pretty much all American teas in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, were made of local American products (sassafras, mint, etc.), black tea (mostly pekoe grade) imported in bulk from China, or some combination thereof. Going across the Pacific, China is just plain closer than India. Also, prior to the advent of containerized shipping, it was cheaper and more practical to get all the tea from one port of origin, because you had to fill an entire bulk hauler with nothing but tea if you wanted the shipping to be at all affordable. Today, an importer can fill a single shipping container with palettes of various goods; but that is a relatively recent development.

We didn't start to see imported named teas in our stores until the nineties, by which time we already had several major competing tea companies (Bigelow, Celestial Seasonings, Arizona, Nestea, Snapple, and of course the old and much maligned standby Lipton, which ironically enough was originally British), each pushing their own line of teas (some more bottled-and-served-cold than others). We already had a pretty well stocked tea aisle. All of the real, tea-containing teas on the aisle had certain things in common, but this was not obvious from their names alone, and of course there were always the herbal teas. Into this mix we now add green tea (which we started to see in stores in the nineties), oolang tea (some time around the turn of the century), white tea (subsequently), and any number of imported blends and specialty teas. But they don't have a long history here, and they have to compete with everything that's already on the shelf. Earl Grey got free publicity from Star Trek, but that doesn't help English Breakfast.

Of course, it's early days yet. If we've only been getting imported named tea blends here for less than a generation, it follows that some that haven't yet caught on, still may do so in the future.

A Treatise on the Length of Handles

I am not a particularly tall man, as men go.

According to Uncle John's Monumental Bathroom Reader (a book that my sister purchased for us to keep in the bathroom because, you know, you've got to have reading material in there, and Reader's Digest these days most emphatically ain't what it used to be), 25% of American men are over six feet tall. Even if the precision of this statistic is in doubt, the general principle is undeniable: there are a lot of men out there who are taller than, you know, the short people.

Well, 25% of American men may be over six feet tall, but I'm not. I don't know my exact height, but my father, who is significantly taller than I am, is still a couple of inches shy of six feet. So presumably more than 25% of American men are taller than my father, and I can tell you for certain that a good deal more than 25% (perhaps as many as 50%) of American men are taller than I am. I'm not shrimpy short, but I'm not especially tall either.

Which brings me around to my main topic of snow shovels, and specifically, the length of snow shovel handles. Apparently the entire snow shovel industry is run by eight-year-old children and/or four-foot-tall women, because it is difficult to buy a snow shovel with a handle that comes anywhere near shoulder height on me (let alone on a tall man). Waist height is more typical. (Okay, so my waist is a little higher than average for a man my height. Still.) By the time you angle the shovel at the thirty-five degrees (from horizontal) or so that you need in order to get next to the sidewalk and separate the snow from it, this means the handle is at, approximately, knee height. (Okay, so my knees are a little higher than average for a man my height, and maybe you could make a shovel work at forty degrees, forty-five if it's got a well-angled edge in good condition. Still.) Even if we assume that twice as many women shovel snow as men (which seems unlikely to me), and that 100% of women are shorter than I am (which is definitely not true), that still means a double-digit percentage of the snow-shoveling population is WAY too tall to use the shovels that are commonly available.

WHY should I have to bend over (or, worse, kneel) until my head is barely above the level of my waist? Is there a good reason for this? (Hint: No, there is not.) I'm not yet forty years old, so I can do that for a couple of minutes, but if I have to shovel any _significant_ amount of area, the bending over gets old. Fast. My back and waist and knees get tired *way* before my arms do, even if it's heavy snow. And my arms are not exactly what you'd call the athletic sort, as anyone who knows me can attest.

And heaven forfend I should want to shovel my way *down* the stairs, starting from the top, from inside the house. (Apparently, it doesn't ever snow at night in Snow Shovel Design Land, or something.) In that case I would have to be enough of a gymnast to bend over until my elbows are level with my ankles. Haha. While that would admittedly make an amusing cartoon short, I am in practice not nearly that flexible, so I generally have to step on the snow I'm about to shovel (which, if it's the kind of warm wet snow we tend to get most of the time around here (albeit, not today), makes it rather harder to shovel afterward) to get to the bottom and work my way back up.

I can sort of understand why shovel handles, when measured from the tip of the blade, might only come to three and a half or four feet, if you were only concerned about selling the blessed things in Japan, where the idea that a man might be six feet tall is simultaneously silly and yet also somewhat terrifying. But in the Western world, where it's *common* for a man to be six feet tall or more, and we have entire chains of clothing stores that cater exclusively to men who are over six and a half feet all, why does nobody sell a snow shovel with a longer handle? I'd buy one. I bet a lot of other guys would too.

Incidentally, there are other things I'd like to have with a longer handle as well. Garden implements, leaf rakes, brooms, mops... one could imagine an entire product line based around this simple concept. But the top of the list, as far as I'm concerned, is the snow shovel.