Er, America remained a major tea drinking country until the mid nineteenth century at least (perhaps up to the late nineteenth century).

Key thing to understand is that trade between Britain (or colonial America) and China was monopolized by the British East India Company until 1833. Tea was a product that the Company imported from China and made a huge profit on.

This was one of the causes of the American Revolution, Americans wanted to trade freely with China but could not because of British law. After the Revolution, American merchants went to China to buy tea. And could ignore British law and the East India Company.

Unfortunately the Americans (and the British) had no major product the Chinese wanted. Thus the British and the Americans became the #1 and #2 seller of drugs, e.g. opium, to the Chinese to pay for all the tea imports. This was the cause of the Opium War in 1839. Franklin Delano Roosevelt's grandfather Warren Delano, Jr famously became wealthy by importing Chinese tea and selling them opium.

Coffee became a major competitor to tea with the American Revolution. But it didn't immediately replace tea.

I happen to have records of Japan's #2 export product to the US in the 19th century which was tea. According to Japanese export records the US bought Japanese tea in ever increasing amounts since the start of trade in 1859. The US imported 182,299 piculs of green tea in 1875. The imports hit a record 310,435 piculs of green tea in 1886. It slowly declined to 204,532 piculs in 1900. By the mid 1930s, the exports were clearly in trouble at under 100,000 piculs.

So Colonial America was a tea drinking society. The Revolution pushed people towards coffee, since tea could not be imported. But after the Revolution many people reverted to drinking tea. Tea drinking remained popular even after the Civil War. But by the end of the nineteenth century, tea drinking was on the wane in the US. By the 1930s, tea had become a minor drink in the American diet.

Edit: I don't know about coffee as much as tea but I do know that Colombian plantations began to make coffee around 1890s and the Brazilian plantations produced vast quantities of coffee starting in the 1930s. It seems likely that that coffee ended up in the US and replaced the tea.

If someone answers this can you also please explain how much of a role the Tea Tax played in this? I have heard it was a major factor but not how it was one.

As somone else said, I'm hoping someone more knowledgebale than I will come along and give you a better answer. But, I do have a little information on the role women played in making coffee more popular than tea.

When the Americans resisted new taxes by boycotting british goods, women got involved. I won't get into women making "homespun" as a way of boycotting british textiles, however, I suppose know that it's generally accepted that women's role in boycotting british goods kind of started there. Anyway, in the early 1770s the boycotts started to focus on tea. Tea became the main focus particularly after 1773, when the british instituted new regulations to undercut the American's illegal importation of non-british tea. So, women substituted herbal teas and coffee and collectively encouraged other women to do the same. To the extent that some women even wrote poems about it. (See: ' The Female Patriots, address'd to the Daughters of Liberty in America' - by: Hannah Griffitts).

My two cents from this is that because women didn't purchase tea, their homes did not consume tea. If women hadn't been empowered through various boycotts resulting in the boycott of tea, the push towards coffee and other tea alternatives may have not played out the same way.

only source I have on hand: "Through Women's Eyes" - Ellen Carol DuBois