There is a serious issue here. Too many of these high street coffee houses, like Starbucks, Costa Coffee, et al, only offer tea in paper cups. Paper fucking cups. Now, I’d say this was acceptable if its a drink-out tea, but if you’re drinking in the shop, you’d expect a proper mug just like coffee.
The cup-using protocol seems to differ from store to store – if you were to have a tea at my local Costa Coffee, you’d get a whole pot of tea complete with a proper mug and a jug of milk, whereas if you were to sit down and drink a tea in a train station Costa, you’d get a paper cup full of hot water – for exactly the same price.
Now, you might be asking: why does this matter? Tea has a delicate flavour – it essentially soaks in the flavour of anything that comes into contact with it. Coffee, on the other hand, has a much stronger overpowering taste and paper wouldn’t affect it noticably. Example in hand – if you were to use a cheap wooden stirrer (another problem with coffee houses) in a cup of tea, your tea would taste all crappy and wooden. Even plastic cups are an improvement, but I suppose paper is used for the environmentalness of it.
Even so, the case is that coffee houses just don’t understand tea. I know that they are designed to cater for coffee primarily, which they do fairly well, but most of the time I just want to sit in and drink a nice cup of tea. Unfortunately however, the prevalence of good tea rooms isn’t quite as widespread as it was a hundred years ago.
For instance, when I’m waiting for a train I have to make do with a chain coffee house. I usually walk around the station in question and study the cup use throughout each store to discern whether ceramic or paper is in use. Sometimes its immediately easy to tell, but often its difficult. I don’t think any Starbucks stores offer tea in ceramic mugs, but I could be wrong.
I think each franchise should at least have a blanket policy for cup use, so I know what i’m getting for my money. But essentially my point is, tea + paper cup = suck.
