'In restaurants and cafes you will be handed a cup of hottish water in a styrofoam cup and a tea bag, from which elements it is physically impossible to create a drinkable beverage.'

All I want, says Helen Angove in the latest Email from America, is a proper cuppa!

In the classic children’s film “Mary Poppins”, Mr Banks explains the history of the Boston Tea Party:

“As the ship lay in Boston Harbour, a party of the Colonists dressed as Red Indians boarded the vessel, behaved very rudely, and threw all the tea overboard. This made the tea unsuitable for drinking - even for Americans”.

And yet I’m not certain that a cup of tannin-stained brine wouldn’t be preferable to some of the excuses one gets served up in this country under the description “tea”.

At best, if you naively accept the offer of a cuppa at a friend’s house, you are likely to find yourself presented with a startling selection of herbal sachets containing a vast range of exotic ingredients (most of which would be more at home in a sachet of bath salts) - but not a single actual leaf of the bush of the genus Camellia Sinensis .

And at worst, in restaurants and cafes and the like, you will be handed a cup of hottish water in a styrofoam cup and a tea bag, from which elements it is physically impossible to create a drinkable beverage.

Important

Being British, tea is important to me. I am as guilty as the next person of slopping some boiling water over a tea-bag in a mug for everyday maintenance of my tea habit, but a really good, properly made pot of tea has a flavour that delights the soul.

It was the late, great Douglas Adams who observed that the reason most Americans prefer coffee to tea is because most of them have never actually had a properly made cup of tea.

Perhaps it could once upon a time have been argued the converse is true for the British - so few of us had tasted decent coffee - but with the introduction of coffee shop culture into the UK this is no longer true.

In fact, I detect a distressingly American trend in the UK for the effort and care put into the preparation of tea in most eateries to decline in proportion to the effort and care put into the preparation of the coffee. But I digress.

At first, I hypothesised that the poor quality of American tea was all to do with the failure to use properly boiling water - most Americans, after all, don‘t even own an electric kettle (the scarcity of electric kettles was possibly the single greatest culture shock of moving to the US).

Hardly inspirational

Experimentation with freshly boiled water and properly warmed teapot proved this not to be the case - I still ended up with a bland, pale, beige liquid - drinkable but hardly inspirational.

My second hypothesis was that the quality of the tea leaves available in the States was simply not as good as that available in the UK. Buying increasingly expensive brands or getting relatives to bring it over with them when they visited failed, however, to improve results.

To finally solve the mystery I had to travel north, to Canada. Like many other Commonwealth countries, Canada clings to its memories of the British Empire with pride.

As we arrived at immigration, a picture of the Queen smiled serenely down at us from the wall. And Victoria (largest city on Vancouver Island) could almost pass as one of the more attractive cities of the UK, complete with grandiose Victorian architecture and double-decker buses - although the totem poles liberally scattered around the city tend to disrupt the illusion.

Upon arrival in British Columbia, as one does after a long journey, the first thing we did was to brew a cup of tea - using some tea bags that we happened to have with us.

The difference was startling - like the contrast between a cheap blended whisky and a single-malt, or between Bud Lite and real ale. It appears that it is the heavy handed chlorination of California’s tap water that kills the flavour of the tea.

Famous

The serendipitous combination of Britishness and good water quality means that Victoria is famous for its tea - in the context of elegant, English-style afternoon teas that enchant your taste buds and lighten your wallet in equal measure.

I had wondered if the improvement in tea quality would be matched by decline in coffee quality - but no - the Pacific Northwest is where the coffee shop vogue originated, and is justly famous for its coffee.

When one knows something about the production of tea and coffee - the back-breaking labour, the way that whole communities, even countries are dependent on the market value of the crop - it seems only reasonable to treat the consumption of tea and coffee with a degree of respect, even reverence. Perhaps places like Victoria have got it right.

And as for us - we have just this morning bought a water filter in the hopes that we can celebrate our Britishness in the consumption of a decent cup of tea.

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