The British are famous for their love of a cuppa, but how much tea do they really drink? According to the United Kingdom Tea and Infusions Association, a lot. The UKTIA estimates over 100 million cups of tea are consumed daily, or 36 billion cups annually. The last official population estimate for the U.K. was 67.6 million, meaning the average Briton drinks 532.5 cups of tea each year. This doesn’t include fruit or herbal teas (otherwise known as infusions), but it does include infused black teas as they contain tea leaves.
Statistics from World Population Review broadly back up the UKTIA’s numbers. The review, which uses data from the United Nations., tells us the U.K. consumes 100,000 tons of tea annually. Tea bags range in weight from around 1.5g to 3g, so this shakes out to somewhere between 33 billion and 66 billion cups of tea. As there’s such an enthusiasm for tea in the U.K., their bags tend to be on the heavier side. Popular brands like Barry’s, Yorkshire, and PG Tips weigh-in at 2-3g, while most guides to brewing loose leaf tea advise using a rounded teaspoon (2-3g) of tea leaves per cup. That was a lot of math to reach a simple conclusion; it seems like British people really do drink an average of about 500 cups of tea every year.
How and when do Brits drink all that tea?
In reality, an average will never apply to everyone, and personal tea consumption in the U.K. varies. There have to be a few diehard coffee enthusiasts spread across the nation. There are also roughly 13 million people under 16 in the U.K. We didn’t find any evidence of midday tea in English schools when we researched what school lunches look like around the world, but several Reddit users on r/AskUK say they were given milky tea as toddlers, while others let their own children have a weak cup with a biscuit (that’s a cookie to most people), making it hard to control for age when divvying out those 30+ billion annual mugs of tea.
We do know that the just over a third (35%) of tea drinkers who responded to a 2023 survey from Product of the Year drink three or more cups a day. This puts them at roughly 1,000 cups each a year, while 20% of Britons do their part by drinking five-10 cups a day. As you might imagine, most people in the U.K. brew their first cup of tea bright and early, around the same time many Americans enjoy their favorite coffee drinks. According to Dr Sharon Hall, Chief Executive of the UKTIA, “Seven out of 10 young adults brew up a cuppa as soon as they get out of bed.”
