Tea was very popular in the American Colonies, but by far the most popular drink in the colonies early national America was Alchohol. All three meals were accompanied by some kind of booze, and it was common for large bowls of spirits to be left around the house for consumption at one's leisure. Colonist's drank a staggering amount at every age, eight ounces a day on average. That's the equivalent of a half pint of pure moonshine a day. There were several reasons for this. Water was unhealthy, it gave people dysentery and other deadly diseases. People didn't know quite why this was the case, but they had noticed that if you made water into alcohol or tea, it nearly eliminated the health risks. It was also seen as a poor man's drink, and the ability to drink alcohol throughout the day was a status symbol.

Tea was a popular drink in the American colonies, just as it was in England, for similar cultural and health reasons. It remained a popular choice for entertaining and occasions when food was not being served. After the Seven Years' (French and Indian) War, the British imposed a series of wildly unpopular taxes on the American colonies to recoup some of the cost incurred protecting them. These taxes were difficult to manage, and could not be paid in colonial paper money but exclusively in British specie (Wood, S,G. "The American Revolution: A History." Modern Library. 2002, page 24.). The taxes were also largely unavoidable, especially the Stamp Act which taxed almost all newspapers, magazines, legal documents, and pamphlets. This made legally conducting business more expensive. The Americans' boycotts of these goods caused British manufacturers to pressure for repeal, as the American colonies were a massive captive market for British manufacturers. After the repeal of the Stamp Act, the British passed and enforced the Townshend Acts intended to reel in Colonial independence, which had in their view run rampant during the period of benign neglect. Taxes were collected in order to maintain a stronger presence of government officials in the colonies, and New York was to be punished for flouting the Quartering Act. The same mechanisms that organized resistance to the Stamp Act came together to resist to Townshend acts, and succeeded in getting many of the provisions repealed. However, the tax on tea was left in place for the express purpose of demonstrating the British government's continued right to tax the colonies. Essentially, Parliament was taxing the colonists just to show they could. This is why the tax on tea incensed the colonists, and explains the drastic reactions and demonstrations. It was not that the tax was excessive, because the Stamp Act provided a much larger and difficult to avoid tax, or due to some sacred reverence for tea. It was the fact that the tax was sent as a message, a slap in the face to Americans who insisted Parliament had no right to tax them. The boycotts that resulted, and the connotations of tea with Royalism from this point forward, precipitated the decline in popularity of tea in the colonies (Luttinger, Nina and Gregory Dicum. The coffee book: anatomy of an industry from crop to the last drop. The New Press, 2006, p. 33.) Coffee and infusions of herbs, peppermint, and other hot beverage replacements all found their popularity in this period as a replacement for tea, and while tea regained lost ground after a time, it never regained its place as the preferred hot beverage in the former British Colonies.