Tea Trivia
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115 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 115 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Tea is brewed from the leaves of which plant species?
Camellia sinensis
Camellia sinensis would grow into a tall tree if left alone; growers prune it to about waist height so the tender new shoots are easy to pluck.
Q 02Which fizzy drink is made by fermenting sweetened tea with a live culture of bacteria and yeast?
Kombucha
Kombucha is probably named by mistake: in Japanese the word means seaweed tea, perhaps borrowed because the gelatinous film of bacteria and yeasts on the brew looked like seaweed.
Q 03Chinese legend credits the discovery of tea to which mythical emperor?
Shennong
Shennong, the legendary Divine Farmer and herbalist, is said to have discovered tea when leaves from a nearby tree drifted 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, tradition says, was an abandoned child raised by a Buddhist monk; he refused to take the robes and ran away to join a troupe of performers before writing his tea classic around 760.
Q 05Which English diarist recorded drinking his first cup of tea in September 1660?
Samuel Pepys
Samuel Pepys sent for his 'cup of tee (a China drink)' on 25 September 1660 after an office talk about war with France and Holland, then went away without a word on how it tasted.
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's dowry also brought England the islands of Bombay, which Charles II handed to the East India Company in 1668, the seed of the city of Mumbai.
Q 07The English word 'tea', unlike Portugal's 'chá', most likely arrived through which rival trading nation?
The Dutch
The Dutch picked up the Min Chinese word 'te', directly or through Malay traders, and their 'thee' passed into English; the Portuguese, buying through Macao, had learned the Cantonese 'cha'.
Q 08Which type of tea is wilted, bruised and only partially oxidized?
Oolong
Oolong leaves are shaken and tossed in bamboo trays to bruise their edges, which is where the browning starts; the Chinese name wulong means 'black dragon'.
Q 09In Morocco, guests are welcomed with glasses of sweet green tea steeped with which fresh herb?
Mint
Mint, usually spearmint, goes into the pot with sugar and Chinese gunpowder green tea, a leaf that British traders brought to North Africa in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Q 10The small tea glasses called ince belli, meaning 'slim-waisted', are traditionally made in what shape?
Tulip
Tulip-shaped glasses are filled from a stacked double kettle: strong tea from the small pot on top, thinned to taste with boiling water from the larger one below.
Q 11As of 2016, which country out-drank the United Kingdom in tea per person, ranking second in the world?
Ireland
Ireland's favourite blends are stronger than the traditional English ones, and because of that strength the tea is commonly served with milk.
Q 12Which group of compounds, also found in red wine, gives strong tea its dry, mouth-puckering bite?
Tannins
Tannins bind to the proteins in saliva, which is why an over-brewed cup leaves the mouth feeling dry and puckered, just as unripe fruit can.
Q 13Which New York tea importer popularized tea bags around 1908 by shipping samples in small silk pouches?
Thomas Sullivan
Thomas Sullivan, the popular story goes, meant customers to empty his silk sample pouches into the pot; they dunked the whole pouch instead, and the tea bag caught on by accident.
Q 21Britain paid for its Chinese tea by smuggling which narcotic into China, provoking war with the Qing?
Opium
Opium grown in British India was sold into China to earn back the silver spent on tea; the Chinese seizure of opium stocks at Canton triggered the First Opium War.
Q 22The 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 23Afternoon tea is usually credited to Anna, the seventh Duchess of which title?
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 14Which brand introduced tea bags to the United Kingdom in 1953?
Tetley
Tetley launched its tea bag in Britain in 1953, once wartime tea rationing had ended, decades after American tea merchants first sold tea that way.
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 hills owe their prized summer flavour to insects: leafhoppers nibble the leaves, and the plants answer with defensive compounds that give the tea its grape-like 'muscatel' note.
Q 17Which English writer laid down eleven rules for the perfect brew in his 1946 essay 'A Nice Cup of Tea'?
George Orwell
George Orwell demanded a strong pot, tea poured into the cup before the milk and no sugar at all, yet admitted that at least four of his eleven rules were 'acutely controversial'.
Q 18Which tea region lies along India's Brahmaputra River and is known for strong, malty black tea?
Assam
Assam's tea gardens keep 'Tea Garden Time', an hour ahead of Indian Standard Time, a system set up under British rule to make the most of the region's early sunrise.
Q 19In Beatrix Potter's tale, which herbal tea does Peter Rabbit's mother give him at bedtime?
Chamomile
Chamomile tea was Peter's lot after his raid on the garden, 'one table-spoonful to be taken at bed-time', while his well-behaved sisters had bread and milk and blackberries for supper.
Q 20Which British prime minister's government passed the Tea Act of 1773 to rescue the ailing East India Company?
Lord North
Lord North meant the act to help the company undersell smuggled tea, but colonists saw a ploy to make them accept Parliament's tea duty, and he is remembered as the minister 'who lost America'.
Q 24Which caffeine-free herbal tea comes from a shrub grown in South Africa's Cederberg mountains?
Rooibos
Rooibos means 'red bush' in Afrikaans, yet its needle-like leaves are green when cut; they turn red only as they oxidise and dry.
Q 25A traditional West Country tea centres on scones served with jam and what?
Clotted cream
Clotted cream is the West Country staple; by tradition Devon spreads the cream on first and Cornwall the jam, a rivalry neither county will let go.
Q 26Earl Grey tea is a black tea flavoured with the oil of which citrus fruit?
Bergamot
Bergamot oil scents the blend named after the second Earl Grey, a British prime minister of the 1830s, who is said to have been given such a tea as a gift.
Q 27Thomas 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 28In which country did Glasgow grocer Thomas Lipton buy tea gardens in 1890?
Ceylon
Ceylon had turned to tea after leaf rust wrecked its coffee estates from 1869; Lipton bought gardens there so he could sell 'direct from the tea gardens to the teapot'.
Q 29Matcha is a finely ground powder of green tea leaves that have been grown how before harvest?
In the shade
In the shade is the answer: covering the bushes before harvest gives matcha its vivid green colour and rich umami flavour.
Q 30The monk Eisai came home from China in 1191 with powdered tea and which school of Buddhism?
Zen
Zen monks drank tea to ward off sleep during long hours of meditation, and Eisai went on to write a treatise praising it as a tonic for body and spirit.