Depends on your definition of "tea." Europeans have been brewing herbs since time immemorial. The descriptions that we have tend to be for brews made for medical purposes. Pennyroyal tea (to reference an old Nirvana song), for example, had the reputation for being an abortificant. Black tea from India or China received the same medicinal treatment in Early Modern European texts. In Poland-Lithuania, my area of expertise, black tea is not really popular until the second half of the eighteenth century and not a household staple until a century later. Even then, it tends to be seen as a medicinal brew as opposed to a recreational beverage we think of today. If you're looking for research materials, off the top of my head I can think of a few earlier descriptions in Jesuit travel accounts, including Giovanni Pietro Maffei's "Le istorie dell' Indie Orientali" (History of East India) from the late sixteenth century. The earliest account I can think of from Central Eastern Europe comes from Michał Boym's travel journal. Boym was a Polish Jesuit, a missionary and a papal ambassador to China in the middle of the seventeenth century. In his "Rerum Sinensium Compendiosa Descriptio" (A short description of Chinese things) he provides a description of Chinese and Japanese drinking the "bitter" beverage, but doesn't give very many clues regarding his own experiences, aside from (borrowing from an article translation here): "It is refreshing on hot days, all the while preventing (kidney?) stones and sleepiness." As we can see, Boym is still looking at tea as a medicinal brew rather than a casual beverage of the day, like beer or wine.