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Comment by cubefox | Hacker News Reader

And I thought it was only the English who have such a close relationship to tea!

> only the English who have such a close relationship to tea

... excluding Japan, China, Russia, all of Central Asia (where I am from), and probably many other countries. So typical for HN.

I'm currently reading "Infused - Adventures in Tea" by Henrietta Lovell. She makes the good point that British people say "normal tea" to refer to English breakfast (blended black) tea, but for the majority of tea drinkers in the world "normal" is green tea.

According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tea_consu..., Turkey is the top tea-consuming country per capita, with Ireland second and UK third. Interestingly, Russia isn't too far off either. I would've assumed Russia to be among the countries with the lowest per capita tea consumption, but these numbers challenge that assumption. I wonder what (cultural?) factors affect those numbers.

Piggybacking off your assumption of Russia having low tea consumption, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_tea_culture is very much a thing.

God, I love Wikipedia. Such a random thing to receive the Wikipedic treatment

Pakistan at number 4 and India isn't even listed. Yeah, I'm not going to take that list seriously.

If you have better sources than the ones on Wikipedia you're welcome to edit it.

The linked Statista source itself doesn't match the ranking in the article. And surprise, surprise it does include India

Acting to fix it would be a better use of one's own time instead of endlessly complaining. I'm going to take a look and fix it myself if you didn't already do it.

Someone removed India a few month ago for some reason: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_countries...

I can confirm that Turks do drink quite a lot of tea. When I visit my family, it's Rize çayı with every meal. People visiting? Everyone has some tea. Sitting down for some TV? More tea. Several glasses at a time usually. It might have been just because I was visiting, but if those numbers are true then it probably is because they just drink that much tea.

In terms of per capita consumption China and Japan are nowhere near the biggest tea drinking cultures in the world: There's a wide gulf between them & the top three which includes the UK & Ireland. But they in turn trail in the wake of the biggest tea drinkers of them all: the Turks.

If we're going to talk about cultures which have a close relationship with tea then the Turks beat out everyone else by a wide margin.

I wonder if this comes down to how tea is made. Per capita consumption of leaves do not account on process or type used.

Maybe per volume might be best option, but that might be very hard to track.

This isnt helpful - they are updating their priors publicly, and your implicit expectation that they should already know is absurd.

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