ICED TEA

Iced tea debuted in 1904 at the Louisiana State Purchase Exposition in St. Louis, Mo. According to the Tea Council, "The temperature was soaring and the staff in the Far East Tea House couldn't get any fair-goers to even look their way, let alone sample their tea. So they poured the hot tea over ice cubes and the drink quickly became the exposition's most popular beverage."

The tea bag was born the same year as iced tea, and its arrival was equally serendipitous. A Boston tea merchant began sending samples of tea in small silk bags for customers to try. Eventually, the convenient pre-measured sacks came to dominate the tea market. In 1994, according to the Tea Council, approximately 60 percent of tea brewed in the United States was prepared from tea bags; just over 1 percent was brewed from loose tea. Iced tea mixes accounted for another 25 percent of prepared tea, and the rest was made from instant tea.

These statistics attest to the importance of the "convenience factor" in tea's growing popularity in this country. The demand for convenience that led to the introduction of the tea bag and the creation of instant tea and iced tea mixes led also to the more recent packaging of ready-to-drink iced tea in cans, bottles, and plastic containers. Ready-to-drink teas are the fastest-growing tea products and the fastest-growing new product in the supermarket, according to the Tea Council.

The Tea Council estimates total U.S. tea sales for 1994 at $3.75 billion, up from $1.8 billion in 1990. On any given day, the council says, about half the population drinks tea, with the greatest concentration of drinkers in the South and Northeast.

Keeping teacups full in the United States and around the world takes a lot of tea. In 1993, 2,581,317 metric tons of tea were produced and 1,142,650 metric tons exported, according to the International Tea Committee's 1994 Bulletin of Statistics. This billion dollar business got its start centuries ago from a plant that once grew quietly undisturbed in a far corner of the world. William H. Ukers, in his comprehensive 1935 tome All About Tea, writes:

"Mother Nature's original tea garden was located in the monsoon district of southeastern Asia. Many other plants now grow there, but specimens of the original jungle, or wild, tea plant are still found in the forests of the Shan states of northern Siam, eastern Burma, Yunnan, Upper Indo-China, and British India. ... Before any thought was given to dividing this land into separate states, it consisted of one primeval tea garden where the conditions of soil, climate, and rainfall were happily combined to promote the natural propagation of tea."