Tea Trivia
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119 free Tea trivia questions with answers — food & drink quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
65 free Tea trivia questions with answers. Tea trivia for anyone who has ever argued about milk first or last. This quiz covers the whole story of the leaf: the legend of Emperor Shennong, the eighth-century Classic of Tea, the Portuguese princess who made it fashionable in England, the Scottish botanist who smuggled plants out of China, and the tax protest that dumped 340-odd chests into Boston Harbor. It also digs into what is actually in the cup: what separates green, oolong and black tea, why matcha is grown in the shade, where bubble tea and masala chai come from, which country drinks the most per person, and why Tibetans get through dozens of small cups a day. Expect easy warm-ups, brand history from Twinings to Lipton, and a few genuinely hard ones about Da Hong Pao and tea-garden time. Every answer has been checked against Wikipedia and the primary sources it cites, and each explanation adds one more thing worth knowing.
30 of 119 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Tea is brewed from the leaves of which plant species?
Camellia sinensis
Camellia sinensis is the one; the others are yerba mate, coffee and rooibos, none of which is technically tea.
Q 02After plain drinking water, which is the most widely consumed beverage in the world?
Tea
Global production reached 29.8 million tonnes in 2022, nearly half of it from China.
Q 03Chinese legend credits the discovery of tea in 2737 BC to which mythical emperor?
Shennong
Shennong, the legendary Divine Farmer, is said to have discovered tea in 2737 BC when leaves blew into his pot of boiling water.
Q 04The Classic of Tea, an eighth-century treatise on tea and its preparation, was written by whom?
Lu Yu
Lu Yu wrote The Classic of Tea (Cha Jing) around 760 AD, describing how tea plants were grown, leaves processed and the drink prepared.
Q 05Which English diarist recorded drinking his first cup of tea in September 1660?
Samuel Pepys
Samuel Pepys wrote on 25 September 1660 that he 'did send for a cup of tee (a China drink) of which I never had drank before'.
Q 06Which princess brought the tea-drinking habit to the English court when she married Charles II in 1662?
Catherine of Braganza
Catherine of Braganza, the Portuguese wife of Charles II, arrived in 1662 already fond of tea and made it fashionable at the English court.
Q 07'Tea' reached English in the 17th century via the Dutch from which variety of Chinese?
Min
The Dutch traded at Fujian and Taiwan, where Min Chinese speakers said 'te'; English adopted that form, while 'cha' had arrived earlier via the Portuguese.
Q 08Which type of tea is wilted, bruised and only partially oxidized?
Oolong
Oolong is partially oxidized, anywhere from about 8 to 85 percent; its Chinese name wulong means 'black dragon'.
Q 09Which country led global tea production in 2022 with roughly 49 percent of the world's 29.8 million tonnes?
China
China grows about half; India adds 20 percent, and a handful of countries including Sri Lanka account for about 81 percent of world production.
Q 10Turkish tea is traditionally served in small glasses of what shape, called ince belli or 'slim-waisted'?
Tulip
Most of it is Rize tea from the Black Sea coast, brewed in a stacked two-pot caydanlik.
Q 11As of 2016, which country was the world's second-biggest per-capita consumer of tea?
Ireland
The Irish average works out to between 2.7 and 4 kilograms per person a year.
Q 12Roughly what share of tea's dry weight is caffeine?
About 3%
Caffeine makes up about 3% of tea's dry weight, which works out to between 30 and 90 milligrams in a 250-millilitre cup.
Q 13Which New York tea importer popularized tea bags around 1908 by shipping samples in small silk pouches?
Thomas Sullivan
Thomas Sullivan's silk sample pouches of 1908 popularized the idea, though Milwaukee's Roberta Lawson and Mary McLaren had patented a 'Tea Leaf Holder' in 1903.
Q 21Which May 1773 act gave the East India Company a monopoly and set off the Massachusetts protest?
The Tea Act
The Tea Act of 10 May 1773 let the East India Company ship tea directly to the colonies, undercutting smugglers while keeping the Townshend tea duty.
Q 22Britain countered its trade deficit with China using which narcotic, sparking an 1839 war?
Opium
Opium grown in British India was sold into China to balance the silver spent on tea; Chinese seizure of opium at Canton triggered the First Opium War in 1839.
Q 23The tea clipper Cutty Sark, built in 1869, takes its name from a character in a poem by whom?
Robert Burns
Robert Burns's 'Tam o' Shanter' supplies the name, the witch Nannie's short shirt; launched in 1869 as the Suez Canal opened, she later hauled Australian wool.
Q 14Which brand introduced tea bags to the United Kingdom in 1953?
Tetley
PG Tips answered decades later with the pyramid bag in 1997.
Q 15In 1848 the East India Company sent which Scottish botanist to China to bring tea plants back to India?
Robert Fortune
Robert Fortune travelled disguised as a Chinese merchant and shipped the plants to India in Wardian cases.
Q 16Darjeeling tea, marketed as the 'Champagne of teas', is grown in the hills of which Indian state?
West Bengal
West Bengal's Darjeeling and Kalimpong districts grow it, and in 2004 it became India's first product with geographical indication protection under the WTO's TRIPS agreement.
Q 17The Tea Board of India recognizes how many estates as producers of authentic Darjeeling tea?
87
The Tea Board recognises 87 gardens, which between them cover about 17,500 hectares at 600 to 2,000 metres above sea level.
Q 18Which is the world's largest tea-growing region by production, sitting in the Brahmaputra valley?
Assam
Assam's gardens long ran on 'Tea Garden Time', an hour ahead of Indian Standard Time, a leftover from British rule.
Q 19Which country was the world's largest exporter of black tea in 2018?
Kenya
Kenya exported more black tea than any other country in 2018; tea was first planted there at Limuru in 1903, and most is sold at the Mombasa auction.
Q 20On December 16, 1773, colonists disguised as Mohawks dumped East India Company tea into which harbor?
Boston
Boston Harbor was the target; about 92,000 pounds of East India Company tea, worth around 9,659 pounds sterling, went into the water.
Q 24Afternoon tea is usually credited to Anna, the seventh Duchess of which title, in the 1840s?
Bedford
Anna Russell, Duchess of Bedford, wanted something to bridge the gap between a light lunch and a dinner that could come as late as eight o'clock.
Q 25The hearty working-class evening meal called 'high tea' got its name from what?
The tall table it was eaten at
It was the hearty working-class evening meal; the dainty afternoon version was 'low tea'.
Q 26A traditional West Country tea centres on scones served with jam and what?
Clotted cream
Clotted cream is the West Country staple; Devon spreads the cream on first and Cornwall the jam, and neither county will let it go.
Q 27Earl Grey tea is a black tea flavoured with the oil of which citrus fruit?
Bergamot
Bergamot oil defines it; Twinings' Lady Grey adds cornflower and Seville orange to the blend.
Q 28Thomas Twining opened Britain's first known tea room in 1706 at No. 216 on which London street?
The Strand
Twinings opened at 216 Strand in 1706 and has traded from that address for over three centuries; its 1787 logo is claimed as the world's oldest in continuous use.
Q 29In which country did Glasgow grocer Thomas Lipton buy tea gardens in 1890?
Ceylon
Lipton bought estates in Ceylon (Sri Lanka) in 1890 to sell tea 'direct from the tea garden to the tea pot'; the yellow pack with the red shield dates from the same year.
Q 30Matcha is a finely ground powder of green tea leaves that have been grown how before harvest?
In the shade
Matcha comes from leaves grown in the shade for several weeks before harvest, which boosts chlorophyll and theanine; the powder is whisked with a bamboo chasen.