By Chris Whitworth
New Zealand’s best coffee baristas will square off at the national championships in Wellington tomorrow to see who brews the best coffee in the land.
It's a celebration of the art of good coffee and New Zealand’s long-standing love affair with the rich, full-bodied beverage.
But one can’t help but smell a change in the air - a fragrant, fruity scent that threatens, ever so gently, to dethrone coffee from its once celebrated social status.
Tea is no newcomer to the beverage game but tends to ride waves of popularity, its social standing reinvented by each new generation of drinkers.
It’s been a drink – and social occasion – that’s proved popular in the past with everyone from royalty to the working class, to probably your mum and grandma.
But for the moment, the ‘cuppa’ has shed its once bland and boring image to remerge young, vibrant and oh-so-chic.
“Tea bags are on the way out and real tea and herbal infusions and fruit infusions are on the way in, and it’s becoming as discerning as espresso coffee,” says Dean Johnson, owner of Cornwall Park Restaurant in Auckland, who pride themselves on their tea.
“We take espresso coffee for granted now, but I would suggest that it’s not too far away before the same thing would happen for tea, and real tea will be de rigueur and anything else will be sub-standard.”
Designer tea stores have cropped up all around the country in recent years, stocking an increasingly huge variety of teas, herbals teas, fruit infusion teas and oriental teas. Supermarkets too have cottoned on to the trend, expanding their tea sections to cater for a younger, more discerning tea lover.
“I know a lot of girls who have started amassing tea collections,” says 23-year-old Auckland PR consultant Kate Webby.
“There is just such a huge range and also there has been a big turn towards the health kick. Instead of having a coffee people are getting into having a green tea.”
She credits the turn to tea on current trends around antique crockery and kitchenware.
“I guess it’s become quite fashionable to have more antiquey things around your house, little knick knacks, for example the nice little tea china cups, the English style ones and the tea stands with the cakes on them.”
“It’s all sort of come back into fashion, having tea and cake and going out for high tea at places”
High tea is an old English tradition that combines tea with a small meal and is usually enjoyed in the late afternoon. In recent times, high tea has come to describe an afternoon tea served in an antique coffee set with sandwiches and cakes displayed in a tiered cake stand.
Tea drinkers have flocked to Cornwall Park Restaurant for its famous high tea for almost 100 years.
Mr Johnson says in recent years tea, and especially high tea, has attracted a much younger patronage, enchanted by its sense of occasion and opportunity to enjoy a dainty afternoon in the sun sipping tea.
“Some of them they go right out and they’re right into the 1920s look – it’s just fantastic,” says Mr Johnson.
“We’ve even had groups where a 15-year-old’s had her birthday party and had her friends and that play ladies, and its just great.”
Not all events are prim and proper though. Mr Johnson says in recent months there has been a growing trend towards hen’s parties having tea in the afternoon as they work up to the evening’s debauchery.
“I guess you’d call it the more restrained part of the hen’s night, where you can invite your mum-in-law without getting embarrassed by your mates.”
“What happens afterwards is another story.”
Some might put the trend down to the upcoming royal wedding, with all things British and a bit posh once again becoming stylish. Or maybe it’s a natural shift to a healthier beverage enjoyed socially.
Regardless, women of all ages are taking time out for tea, a trend yet to blend its magic on the male population of New Zealand.
3 News