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England is often called a nation of tea drinkers… Fancy a cuppa? In this English culture lesson, I’m going to teach you about drinking tea in England. We’ll explore the long history of drinking tea in England going back to the eighteenth century when tea was an upper class drink. I’ll also teach you the difference between ‘posh tea’ and ‘builder’s tea’, which has to do with the different preferences for drinking tea that correspond to the different social classes in England. And finally, I’ll teach you some expressions and sentences related to drinking tea so that you know exactly what to say the next time an English person asks you whether you’d ‘like a cuppa’.

TRANSCRIPT

Hi, everyone. In this lesson I'm going to talk to you about drinking tea in England. You probably know that we drink a lot of tea over here in England, and we have been drinking tea for a really, really long time. Tea started to come here in the 18th century, and that was the time when the British were exploring the world and trading, and bringing back... Bringing back the things that they found in other countries and selling them to people in England. So tea was once an upper-class drink, and you had to have a lot of money if you wanted to drink tea. And back then there was a place for you to keep your tea, it was called a tea caddy, a box, and often they had locks on them because tea was so expensive back then. Obviously it's a very different story now. It's not like that about tea. And back then when... In these older times when the upper-class people were drinking tea, one of the ways for you to display your wealth, and status, and how much money you had was by investing money in your tea sets, lovely... Lovely little cups that you can drink your tea from, you drink it very, very slowly and drink your tea like this, and pour from the teapot ever so slowly. That's how they... Tea was a whole social event back in the 18th century, and it was a way for women to get together with their friends in the afternoon and spend time talking, so tea was a... Tea was a big change in the upper-class culture back then, and ever since those times we've been drinking tea, but now everybody drinks tea in England. Well, maybe not everybody because it could be the case that the... The golden years of tea drinking in England are over. The years that tea was the most part of English culture, because now lots more people drink coffee. And even when I was younger, like 20 years ago, not so many people drank coffee. And if you go around in London now you'll see lots and lots of coffee shops everywhere. People do still drink tea, but it seems to be changing that they drink tea at home or they drink tea at work, but when they're out walking around or they stop to get a hot drink somewhere, then they drink coffee. So times are changing in England, but yet it's still very useful for us to know about the language of drinking tea, and something about the culture of it.

 

English tea is also an experience that people coming to England like to have as a tourist experience, so they might want to go out for afternoon tea, which means to go to a lovely hotel somewhere and have tea. You know, like the old times when they use the teapot and you drink it all slowly like this, you can still drink like that today in the lovely hotels that we've got in London. They're very posh. Very posh, expensive hotels. You can still drink tea that way and it is a really nice experience that I recommend to anyone if they're coming to England or specifically London on a holiday and you'd like to do something a bit different.

 

Okay, so let's start by talking about posh tea. What is it exactly? Now, I know the English are famous in many countries for ruining their tea, and drinking it in the worst way possible because in many countries they cannot imagine that people would drink tea with milk in it. To them it's a disgusting idea. Why would you do that? Well, that's the way most people drink their tea in England even today. Except if you are very, very posh and you have a very, very, very expensive tea, then it's probably the case that you don't drink it with milk. So, instead of having milk tea or milky tea, you drink your tea black just with the tea leaves, no milk, or you would drink that tea with a slice of lemon. And if you drink it this way without the milk, some people would say you get more of the true flavour of the tea and you're not spoiling it with the milk taste.

 

I already told you that in the old days they drank their tea like this, and they lifted their finger in the air when they were drinking. It was all so dainty like this. They used a cup and a saucer. The saucer is here, the cup is here, and when you're carrying... When you're carrying it, you carry it by the saucer, the bottom, and you try not to spill it. It's hard. It's hard if you've got shaky hands, so you try not to spill it. But if you're a lovely lady and you've come from lots of money then you probably don't carry your own teacup ever, so it's okay.

 

Next we have milk jug. The milk is in a jug, it's separate. A milk jug, what is a milk jug like? Looks something like this. Well, that looks like a saucer as well. Milk jug is like this. So you can decide how much milk you want in your tea. You can pour it in yourself. Tea leaves is only for posh tea, and the reason is when you make tea from tea leaves it makes a mess, so obviously you don't want to clean it up yourself, you don't want to create extra mess if you're making it yourself, so only posh people use tea leaves because also you need extra equipment. It's not easy to make, and you have to be patient and wait a few minutes. You need a tea strainer.

 

A tea strainer is something... Something like this. That looks bigger than it actually is, but it would go... When you're pouring from the teapot into the cup, the tea strainer catches the tea leaves. Now, if you know what you're doing then the tea leaves don't go in the cup. But if you don't know what you're doing you'll make a mess and it might be embarrassing. But the lovely ladies know how to use the tea strainer, they never get confused.

 

Next we've got cucumber sandwiches. Cucumber sandwiches, they don't sound very delicious do they? How to show you what they look like? Right, that's the better way to show you what they look like. They're triangular sandwiches. Ignore that. In triangle shapes, and you don't... There's no... You know on a piece of bread this part is the crust, they cut that off. They only use this part. They waste... I don't know what they do with that. I hope they feed it to the birds, but you don't... You don't see that part. You just get the lovely sandwich with a cucumber inside. And I think they... I think they've put salmon and cucumber together, or they put other things with cucumber. But it's a very light, very... You have your tea, you eat your sandwich, it's all very nice. After you can have your scone or your scone, scone or your scone.

 

Scones people like to eat with jam and cream, or butter. Jam, cream, or butter and jam. Scones are kind of savoury cake that... It's a heavy cake as well. And when you go to the lovely places to eat your tea, they're usually really big so they fill you up a lot. And yeah, some people say: "Scones" and some people say: "Scones". It depends. I say: "Scones". So you can have all this experience of eating scones, lovely, lovely sandwiches, lovely tea, teapots, you can have all of this if you go to afternoon tea. Some of the places you can go in London that are famous are the Ritz Hotel, the Dorchester Hotel, the... You can go to Harrods, the department store, you can go to Fortnum and Mason which is a famous food department store, so there's many places you can get it and it's a really nice experience with the tablecloth, and lots of... Everything done perfectly, and also, this is the best part, if you like champagne, even though it's called afternoon tea, these days you can have champagne.

 

Okay? So that's another reason to go to afternoon tea. But that's not how English people drink tea in their everyday lives - no, no, no, it's not. They are more likely to drink at home what we call builder's tea. Builders are people that work on a house and do a practical job, build the house, that kind of thing, repair the house. Builder's tea is when you make the tea at home by yourself using a teabag. A teabag, if you haven't already seen it, I'm sure you have, usually in England it looks like a round shape like that. In a lot of other countries it's more like a little... A little square bag with a string on it. Right? So you put the bag with the string in the tea, and you go up and down, up and down, up and down, you take it out. In England in builder's tea, it's not like that. It's this round teabag you put in the cup, and you must use a teaspoon to take it out.

 

There's no string. So, builder's tea isn't all lovely like this, and: "Oh, look at us drinking our tea. Look at us being ladies." Builder's tea is using a completely different kind of cup for a start; we use mugs. Mugs, they don't break so easily. Mugs usually have something funny written on them, a joke, or they're bright colours, or humorous or something, and the builder's tea has... Usually has lots of sugar in, so someone will have two lumps of sugar or if they really like sugar they'll have three sugars in their builder's tea. And instead of eating it with scones you eat... You can dunk... Dunk some biscuits in. Dunk. "Dunk" is a verb. You can dunk in your digestive biscuits, are the most famous biscuits for eating with tea.

 

Dip it in, eat the biscuit. So let's look at a dialogue here of drinking tea. If you ever go to the house of an English person it's polite for you to be offered a hot drink when you're there, so they may say to you: "Would you like a cuppa"? "Cuppa" means a cup of tea, cup-of-tea, "cuppa". -"Would you like a cuppa?" -"Ooh. That would be lovely. Mmm, tea." -"Milk and sugar? Milk and sugar? Milk and sugar? Milk and sugar?" -"Milk and two sugars, please." -"I'll put the kettle on." Off they go to make the tea. You're probably only getting builder's tea in this house today. Or someone might ask you, instead of saying: "Would you like a cuppa?" they'll say: "How do you take your tea?" They're already going to make you tea. "How do you take your tea?" And this is when you tell me: Do you want milk, do you want sugar, do you like it strong, do you like it weak? If you... If you like the teabag in just really, really quickly and taken out, so the tea is not very dark, and perhaps if you're going to have a lot of milk in it as well, you say: "I like my tea weak as dishwater. I like my tea weak as dishwater." Although here we have a bit of a language debate happening because some people say it's meant to be they mean: "I like my tea dull as dishwater..." They say: "I like my tea dull as ditchwater."

 

Okay? They sound similar, don't they? "Dishwater", "ditchwater". So we've heard it so much nobody knows which is the right way you're meant to say it. To my mind this makes more sense: "Weak as dishwater" because dishwater is when you're cleaning your plates, when you're washing up, it's that water that's left, slightly grey, dirty-looking kind of water, that's what you get left. "Ditchwater", a "ditch" is in the countryside... In the countryside, here's the road, here's the edge of the road, here's the field. This is the field, here. The ditch is the place between the road and the field, and the ditch is like this. So when it rains water comes in here, so that's also a dirty kind of water. So, how do you take your tea? You decide, either weak as dishwa... Weak as dishwater or dull as ditchwater. "Dull" means not bright, not shiny. And, yeah, people disagree what's the right answer for that. So, thank you for watching today's lesson. What you can go and do now is the quiz on drinking tea in England, and I'll see you again soon. Bye.