Tea in Europe
Europe grows very little tea itself, but it has shaped global tea culture more than almost any other continent: through trade routes, colonial plantations, blending houses, and the specific rituals different countries built around the cup.
Britain and the birth of "teatime"
Tea arrived in Britain in the 17th century via Portuguese and Dutch trading networks, and Catherine of Braganza, a Portuguese princess who married Charles II in 1662, is often credited with popularising the habit at the English court. What followed was a centuries-long entanglement of tea with British identity and empire: the East India Company's tea trade, the 1773 Boston Tea Party as a protest against British tea taxation in the American colonies, and eventually the 19th-century development of Indian and Ceylon tea estates once China's near-monopoly on supply became a geopolitical liability. British tea culture today is built around strong, blended black teas (often finished with milk) and "afternoon tea," a ritual said to have been popularised in the 1840s by Anna, Duchess of Bedford.
Blending capitals: London and beyond
Much of the tea the world associates with Europe was never grown here at all: it was blended here. London in particular became (and remains) a major global centre for tea blending and trading, taking leaf grown across Asia and Africa and combining it into consistent, branded blends like English Breakfast and Earl Grey.
Brussels and Belgium
Belgium doesn't grow tea, but Brussels has a real, if quieter, tea culture of its own: one that tends to sit alongside the city's famous chocolate and patisserie traditions rather than compete with coffee culture for attention. Brussels' many tea salons and specialty tea shops reflect the city's broader character as a genuinely multilingual, international crossroads: French, Dutch and English tea vocabulary all circulate side by side, and the city's EU and diplomatic community has long brought in tea-drinking habits from across the world.
Brussels also has a real, if indirect, historical link to the tea world through Belgium's colonial administration of Ruanda-Urundi (present-day Rwanda and Burundi) from 1916 until independence in 1962. Tea cultivation in Rwanda was formally established during the Belgian trusteeship period in the 1950s, with the country's first tea estates planted in that decade: meaning Brussels, in a roundabout way, has historical ties to one of the East African tea regions covered on this site's Africa page.
Russia and Eastern Europe
Tea reached Russia overland via camel caravan from China in the 17th century, long before it became common in Western Europe, and developed its own strong culture centred on the samovar: a heated metal urn traditionally used to brew a strong tea concentrate that's then diluted with hot water to taste, often drunk with sugar, jam, or through a sugar cube held in the mouth.
Other European traditions
Ireland has one of the highest per-capita tea consumption rates in the world, favouring strong, heavily milked black tea blends. Germany's East Frisia region maintains a distinct tea ceremony involving rock sugar and cream. Southern and Central Europe, meanwhile, lean more toward herbal infusions and tisanes (chamomile, mint, linden) alongside a stronger historical pull toward coffee.