Green tea history is an amazing story in the United States when you think that green tea was the original beverage of choice in the United States.
The Dutch brought green tea to their North American colony, whose capital is now New York, in the 1600s. Green tea became quite popular and was only sometimes flavored with sugar and peach leaves. With this in mind, you can see that originally we were all drinking really healthy green tea and sweetening the tea was not the norm.
In 1773, the Tea Act of 1773 was passed by Parliament to save the British East India Company from bankruptcy, granting it a virtual monopoly over the British tea market and allowing direct sales access to the colonies (colonial merchants were cut out of the loop entirely). As a consequence, East India Company tea cost the least of any available tea, foreign or domestic. Following the retention of the 3 pence Townshend duty on tea in 1770, colonists had generally boycotted British brands, turning instead to contraband Dutch brews. An estimated 90 percent of all tea consumed in the colonies was of the Dutch variety, so patriots could sip cheaply while avoiding the despised revenue duty altogether. Now, even with the Townshend duty added, East India tea remained the least expensive. Because the tax seemed "hidden" in this manner, colonists viewed the Tea Act as an underhanded way to foist the tax, and Parliamentary taxation power, onto the colonies.
And as we all know from our history books, this prompted the Boston Tea Party. On December 16, 1773, American patriots dressed as Mohawk Indians boarded the vessels of the East Indian Company docked in the Boston harbor and dumped all the tea that was on the three ships into the ocean. They emptied 342 chests of tea which was valued at more than 10,000 pounds.
This led to other rebellions and eventually the Declaration of Independence and American preference of coffee over tea.
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