The revolution drinks tea

In a trendy beverage progression he describes as "Red Bulls, coffee, and everything else," Digg founder Kevin Rose has now arrived at an ancient plateau: tea. He tells Wired Magazine that his company now spends $1,000 a month on special teas for his employees, including his favorite, Pu-erh from the Yunnan province. "It's one of those things where you want to turn to something really natural and from the Earth... Once you start consuming tea it makes sense: This is the best of all worlds."

Remember Emergen-C? Smoothies with protein powder mixed in? Wheat grass juice? Jolt cola? Am I showing my age? Don't answer that. Tea is where it's at now, and says Wired, it's "the tipple of choice for the Twitterati," the internet elite like Rose and "business guru" Tim Ferriss. After all, Tea has a Facebook page. Rose says we're close to the tipping point with tea; an unscientific test on Twitter showed half as many references to tea as coffee (certainly a nice sum in the morning of the West Coast, where most of us Twitterati live).

Will tea overtake coffee as the four-buck morning sip of choice? Finer loose-leaf varieties are making an appearance at major coffee chains like Peet's and Starbucks, though the London Fog Tea Latte is a long way from Pu-erh from the Yunnan mountains. What I think Rose and Ferriss miss is that the tea "craze" is not a new thing; here in Portland and Washington, D.C., where I lived at the time, tea shops started popping up in the late 1990s. A tipping point a long time in coming or simply an ancient beverage that Kevin Rose suddenly loves? What do you think?