But tastes change and interest in drinking hot tea is rising. Last year Starbucks paid $620m for Teavana and together they plan to take on the $90 billion "global hot and iced-tea category". Starbucks is opening its first Teavana-branded tea house that will sell hot tea (but no coffee) on October 24th, in New York’s Upper East Side. Cliff Burrows, the group president of Starbucks, thinks that buying Teavana will help it tap the growing market for drinking tea in many flavours and varieties. One reason for the brewing interest is that the younger generation, the millennials, have travelled to more exotic climes and discovered the world's favourite drink.

Like coffee and chocolate, teas have a rich history and background that the new stores will capitalise on. Mr Burrows was drinking a monkey-picked oolong as we spoke over the phone. (Starbucks has also come up with several other rather whizzy modern interpretations of tea, such as sparkling silver-needle iced tea and sparkling golden monkey.) Argo has done well selling hot tea to drink, but Starbucks is a force to be reckoned with. At the end of the year, when a second Starbucks tea house opens, in Seattle, it will become clearer whether Americans are ready to fall in love with tea again. And to give a (kind of) definitive ruling on the subject, Starbucks’s Mr Burrows thinks those who use milk in their tea should put it in after the tea has been poured into the cup, not before.

正如任何外国人可以告诉你的一样，美国人热爱咖啡。相比欧洲咖啡馆里可以令人眼花缭乱各式各样的小包装，美国的咖啡是用水稀释的滤煮法，不过这也是咖啡。然而，人们很难找到像样的一杯茶，但这种情况即将改变。

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