tea.ceo The tea calendar
The daily tea times, on your own clock wherever you are, and the days of the year that exist chiefly to be marked with a cup. Each one counts down; any of them can go into your calendar with a reminder attached.
Every day
On your own clock, wherever you are.
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Early morning tea
A cup in bed before the day is allowed to begin. In grander houses it arrived on a tray; for the rest of the country there was the Teasmade, an alarm clock with a kettle attached, which is about as British an invention as exists.
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Breakfast tea
The first pot of the day: strong, black and nearly always with milk. A blend of Assam, Ceylon and Kenyan leaf is the usual thing, brewed long enough to stand a spoon in, or very nearly.
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Elevenses
A cup and a biscuit at eleven: the mid-morning pause the British have kept long enough to give it a name. The biscuit is, strictly speaking, optional. Nobody has ever treated it as such.
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Afternoon tea
Tea, sandwiches, scones and cake at four. The custom is credited to Anna, Duchess of Bedford, who around 1840 found the gap between luncheon and a dinner that had drifted towards nine o'clock a little long, and did something about it.
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4:20 High Tea
A second pot at twenty past four, for those who find the hour amusing. Proper high tea is not until six; this one is merely elevated.
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High tea
The original high tea was a working family's evening meal: meat or a pie, bread and butter, and a strong pot to wash it down, on the table at about six. It has nothing whatever to do with cake stands, whatever the hotel brochures say.
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Bedtime cuppa
The last cup of the day, usually with a biscuit and quite often in a mug that does not match anything. Something gentler than the breakfast pot is wise at this hour: a white tea, or a cup that has not seen a tea plant at all.
Tea days of the year
From midnight to midnight, your time.
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National Hot Tea Day
America's day for drinking its tea hot, which it otherwise mostly takes over ice. Set by the Tea Council of the USA in the middle of January, when the argument makes itself.
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National Tea Day
Britain's own tea day, kept since the mid-2010s on 21 April, which was also the late Queen's birthday. Tea rooms mark it; so, quietly, does everyone else.
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Hachijū-hachiya, the 88th night
The 88th day after the first day of spring in the old Japanese calendar, and the traditional start of the shincha harvest: the first and most prized green tea of the year. Tea picked on this day is held to bring good health, and is sold as such.
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International Tea Day
The UN's tea day, adopted by the General Assembly in December 2019 and first kept in 2020. May was chosen because it is the season of the best picking in most of the countries that grow tea.
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National Iced Tea Day
The American summer's own tea day. The usual story sends iced tea's fame back to the St Louis World's Fair of 1904, where a heatwave persuaded a tea merchant to pour it over ice.
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National Cream Tea Day
Scones, clotted cream, jam and a pot of tea, and the annual chance to settle whether the cream goes on first (Devon) or the jam (Cornwall). We shall not be taking sides.
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The Boston Tea Party
On the night of 16 December 1773 some 342 chests of the East India Company's tea went into Boston Harbour. It remains the most expensive cup never brewed, and a fine excuse to make a pot and drink it properly.
How the reminders work
"Remind me" downloads a small calendar file. Open it and your phone or computer adds the tea time to your own calendar, repeating, with an alarm: five minutes before each daily tea time — long enough to boil a kettle — and at nine in the morning on a tea day. Nothing is sent to us, and nobody needs your email address.