If you've ever stood over a canister stove waiting for water to boil so you can drop in a tea bag, congratulations: you're participating in a proud American tradition of not really trying. Unlike Britain or Australia, where tea-specific camping gear evolved its own dignified lineage — billy cans, purpose-built kettles, whole ceremonies around "putting the billy on" — American camping technology looked at all that and decided to build a better coffee percolator instead.
That could read as a small tragedy for tea. It isn't. It's simply what happens when equipment manufacturers follow demand rather than lead it, and for a hundred years the demand was suspiciously ambiguous. Tea in America hasn't always been the underdog it's often made out to be today — for most of the 19th century it was coffee's equal, not its casualty, and it went down swinging (in some cases, literally, over a camper's head — more on that shortly). It hasn't always had its own gear, either, and what it lacked in dedicated equipment it made up for by doing what resourceful trail companions have always done: making do with whatever pot was already on the fire, unwashed coffee residue and all. This is the story of how that happened, and of the surprisingly stubborn little rituals — swung pots, cloth strainers, and tea bags dropped into borrowed coffee pots — that kept tea limping gamely along.
The popular version of this story goes: Boston Tea Party, patriotic boycott, tea never recovers, coffee wins by default, the end, roll credits. It's tidy, it's satisfying, and it's wrong — the historical equivalent of blaming your entire adult life on one bad breakup in high school. Historical trade and consumption records show tea and coffee were fierce, genuinely neck-and-neck competitors throughout the entire 19th century and into the 20th — right up until the Second World War.[1] What actually happened is stranger, slower, and considerably less patriotic than a simple national grudge.
[Gunpowder green tea]
For one thing, Americans weren't drinking much British tea for most of that stretch, mostly out of spite dressed up as commerce. Independent America deliberately avoided the British trade monopolies running through India and Ceylon, and instead built its own direct transpacific shipping routes straight to East Asia.[2] The result was a very specific, very entrenched national taste: green tea, especially the tightly rolled "gunpowder" variety, dominated American tea drinking for most of the 19th century, far outselling black tea. By 1880, Japanese green tea alone accounted for 47 percent of all U.S. tea imports, with China supplying most of the rest.[3] Gunpowder tea's tight rolled leaves weren't just a stylistic flourish, either — that compact shape resisted moisture damage on the long sea crossing from Asia, which is more thought than most modern hikers put into their own snack packaging.
Green tea's dominance wasn't a niche curiosity confined to a few precious upper-crust sippers with pinkies aloft. It was mainstream enough to define the era's most iconic tea drink, which will surprise absolutely everyone who has ever ordered sweet tea at a diner south of the Mason-Dixon line. The 1879 iced tea recipe in Housekeeping in Old Virginia, one of the earliest written American iced tea recipes, calls for green tea, ice, and lemon — full stop, no sugar, no apology.[3] The beverage most people now picture as quintessentially Southern and quintessentially black-tea started life green, which is the kind of plot twist that would get a cookbook cancelled today.
So if tea wasn't losing to coffee for most of the 1800s, what changed? Global war, mostly, with an assist from marketing — history's two great disruptors of an otherwise perfectly good beverage. World War I and World War II both cut off the transpacific supply lines that had fed America's green tea habit for a century, severing trade with China and Japan just as it had always operated. Forced back onto the open British trade network it had spent a century pointedly ignoring, American consumers adapted to what was actually available: black tea from India.[4] The shift wasn't gradual — by the end of World War II, an estimated 99 percent of all tea consumed in America had become black tea.[4] Green tea, once the default, was functionally gone from the American cup almost overnight, evicted not by taste but by torpedoes.
Coffee, meanwhile, had its own wartime tailwind, and made the absolute most of it. U.S. coffee consumption climbed to an all-time peak of 46.4 gallons per capita in 1946, driven by the newly institutionalized workplace "coffee break" and by military rations that had put a tin cup of coffee in soldiers' hands for the better part of two world wars.[4] Tea had just lost its supply chain and its signature variety in the same decade coffee was hitting its high-water mark and cementing itself into the national workday — which is a far more interesting collapse than "everyone stayed mad about 1773," and considerably harder to fit on a commemorative tea towel.
The aftershocks are still visible in the numbers, like scar tissue. Industry data today shows black tea holding roughly 84 percent of the U.S. tea market, and about 80 percent of American tea consumption happening iced — a beverage still quietly compensating for a war that ended eighty years ago.[4]
It's also worth dispelling another myth while we're at it: that tea is somehow inherently feminine, a drink for dainty ladies and uncalloused man-boys who faint at the sight of a woodstove. That reputation is an accident of 20th-century marketing, not a fact about the leaf — and it's worth unpacking properly, which we'll get to once we've established that tea, historically, could absolutely kick your ass.
Whatever tea showed up at 19th-century American camps, it showed up as a genuinely popular national beverage, not a scrappy holdout — and it did not arrive subtly, or apologetically, or with a gentle steeping time. Lumberjack camps in particular have a well-documented reputation for tea brewed almost violently strong — the kind of tea anecdotally described as "strong enough to float an ax on," which is not a metric found in any modern tea-brewing guide but arguably should be. George Washington Sears, writing under the name Nessmuk in Woodcraft and Camping, offers a more affectionate description than that image suggests, describing the ideal camp brew as "the sort of tea that takes hold, lifts the hair, and disposes the drinker to hilariousness." That's not a complaint. That's a man recommending his tea the way other men recommend a good used truck — almost certainly the green, gunpowder-style tea that dominated American cups at the time. (To learn about other important figures check out Influential Figures in Backpacking History)
The method behind that strength was blunt and entirely uninterested in your opinion: a scoop of loose leaf — roughly a tablespoon, about 3 grams — per cup, plus an extra scoop "for the pot," boiled directly in the water rather than steeped politely off to the side like some kind of houseguest. Run the numbers and the old-timers weren't exaggerating for effect. A scoop-per-cup ratio in a typical camp pot works out to something like 3.5–4 grams of leaf per 8 ounces of water — already in coffee's caffeine range — and because the leaves were boiled for an extended stretch rather than given a gentle 2–3 minute steep, extraction ran high. A normal cup of green tea, brewed properly, yields something like 20–45 milligrams of caffeine. Double the leaf and boil it hard, and you're plausibly looking at 60–100 milligrams a cup — solidly in drip-coffee territory — and some camp cooks pushed it further still, keeping the pot at a rolling boil for ten minutes or more for what was affectionately called "overboiled" tea, a phrase that does a lot of quiet, honest work.[5] It tasted like bitter tannin and unresolved ambition. It also worked, which — for a beverage that, at the time, had every right to consider itself coffee's equal — was really the only requirement that mattered.
Of course, being the dedicated researcher and manly outdoorsman I am, I had to try this old school tea recipe. The first sip arrived almost deceptively gentle — a soft, grassy nothing, coy about what it had in store. I'd taken it plain, the way a lumberjack would have: no sugar, no milk, nothing to cushion the blow. Then the aftertaste turned traitor. A bitterness crept in like wet cardboard dissolving on the tongue, sharp enough to pull my lips into an involuntary unmanly pucker, and my mouth went bone-dry — that unpleasant medicinal-cotton feeling of a mouth gone suddenly, uncomfortably parched. Underneath it all lingered something faintly sulfurous, like tea steeped with well water that had spent too long brooding underground. I expected the bitterness to fade in a minute or two, the way bad coffee does. Instead, it settled in for the long haul, coating the back of my throat for the better part of an hour — a low, chalky ghost of a beverage, unwilling to leave the premises. The next day, in the name of science and poor judgment, I tortured myself again, this time with sugar. A generous dose softened the bitterness, technically, but did nothing for the dry aftertaste, which remained parked at the back of my throat like it had signed a lease. This is a recipe best left to history and burley lumberjacks.
None of that old-timey camp tea arrived pre-strained. A delicate mesh or perforated tin tea steeper or strainer was one more tiny thing to break, lose, or clean with precious water supplies — an unacceptable liability in a life already full of axes. Camp cooks bypassed strainers entirely by relying on simple physics to keep leaves and coffee grounds out of their teeth, physics being free and widely available. There was no tea bag yet either, so getting the leaves back out of the pot required actual technique, and camp cooks developed a small toolkit of them, ranked roughly from showy to practical:
- Swinging the pot. The signature move, best documented in Australian "billy tea" culture but echoed in North American camps too: grab the pot by its handle and swing it in a full vertical circle over your head, using centrifugal force to fling the leaves to the bottom and sides so the clarified tea could be poured straight from the top. This was less a brewing technique than a demonstration — the kind of skill a dedicated camp cook performed as much for an audience as for the tea, roughly the 19th-century equivalent of flair bartending, and with similar odds of a mess. Writer Douglas Wood has treated this settling ritual, along with cousins like spoon-tapping and dropping an eggshell in the pot to draw the grounds down, as genuine camp folklore rather than mere technique — ceremony as much as craft.[6]
- Pouring off the leaves. The unglamorous default, and the choice of anyone who has ever burned themselves before breakfast: let the leaves settle to the bottom, then pour carefully, sometimes holding a spoon, lid, or flat plate at the pot's mouth to catch stray floaters on the way out.
- A scrap of cloth. Stretched over a cup or held between pot and cup, an old shirt or bit of cheesecloth caught both whole leaves and the finer sediment. In a camp without a dedicated strainer — which was most camps — this was the workhorse method, and a fairly firm argument for never asking too many questions about the shirt in question.
None of it required specialized gear. All of it required a person willing to fuss with hot tea leaves by firelight, which is really the whole story of American camp tea in miniature: not a lack of ingenuity, but ingenuity spent on technique rather than tools. Also, none of those methods are posh or feminine. There is no porcelain, milk, or sugar in camp. Only hot, black, bitter liquid, sometimes filtered through a highly questionable piece of old fabric that had, at some point, definitely been a shirt.
That toughness is worth dwelling on, because it cuts directly against the other myth this essay set out to retire. Tea's reputation as a dainty, feminine drink is a 20th-century invention, not an inherited truth, and somebody should really tell the lumberjacks. Chasing the female household shopper who did most of the era's grocery buying, tea advertisers in the early 20th century leaned hard into lace-and-porcelain imagery, and — by some accounts — went too far down this path leading to a slow shift that resulted in tea's modern feminine milieu. Coffee's own tough-guy image — black, unsweetened, served in a battered tin cup — got the same treatment from the opposite direction, manufactured by 20th-century advertising rather than discovered in the bean. Neither beverage was born gendered. Both simply got dressed by copywriters trying to move product, and tea got handed the worse outfit. (To read about coffee on the trail visit The History Of Backpacking Coffee Gear)
Survey 19th-century American camping equipment lists — pioneers, surveyors, prospectors, weekend campers alike — and the pattern holds steady, and steadily unglamorous: iron cookpots, frypans, tin pots and pails.[7] A dedicated teapot, in copper or tin, was common enough back home in American parlors and kitchens, where nobody was worried about pack weight. At camp, that same all-purpose pot made coffee, then made tea, crumbs and all — because, as one historical-reenactment discussion of 18th- and 19th-century gear bluntly concluded, most people camping outdoors weren't going to carry a proper tea kettle when a pot or tin cup did the job just as well.[8] Efficiency, it turns out, has always outranked etiquette in the woods.
Tin was by far the dominant material of camp cookware, on the reasonable grounds that it was cheap and nobody cried if you dented it. Copper was also present but how popular it was is difficult to ascertain. What is clear is that it was more expensive. Not everyone skipped it, though. Campers who could afford one did sometimes bring a copper pot into the field — copper boiled water faster, resisted corrosion, and was durable enough to be repaired and handed down for decades, which made it as much an heirloom as a tool, and possibly the only camping item anyone has ever willed to a grandchild. But this was a comfort of the upper classes rather than a standard kit item. A 1900 issue of Field and Stream discussing camp equipment reflects exactly that split — copper for those who could justify the expense, tin for everyone else.[9] Cookware had its own small material hierarchy, largely split along class lines, because apparently nothing in America escapes that.
We shouldn't assume the all-purpose pot had the field entirely to itself. Tea kettles remained genuinely popular in mountaineering circles, and camp-specific designs were manufactured and carried by people who simply preferred tea to coffee, whether they were headed up a mountain or setting up beside a lake, budget and pack weight be damned. A 1914 advertisement for Sternau & Co.'s line of camp stoves and pots features a stove designed to burn Sterno fuel and sold together with a matching tea kettle (above). ("Sterno" referred to the canned fuel and was a product of parent company "S. Sternau & Co." maker of metal teapots, percolators, and chafing dishes)
The aftershocks are still visible in the numbers, like scar tissue. Industry data today shows black tea holding roughly 84 percent of the U.S. tea market, and about 80 percent of American tea consumption happening iced — a beverage still quietly compensating for a war that ended eighty years ago.[4]
It's also worth dispelling another myth while we're at it: that tea is somehow inherently feminine, a drink for dainty ladies and uncalloused man-boys who faint at the sight of a woodstove. That reputation is an accident of 20th-century marketing, not a fact about the leaf — and it's worth unpacking properly, which we'll get to once we've established that tea, historically, could absolutely kick your ass.
Whatever tea showed up at 19th-century American camps, it showed up as a genuinely popular national beverage, not a scrappy holdout — and it did not arrive subtly, or apologetically, or with a gentle steeping time. Lumberjack camps in particular have a well-documented reputation for tea brewed almost violently strong — the kind of tea anecdotally described as "strong enough to float an ax on," which is not a metric found in any modern tea-brewing guide but arguably should be. George Washington Sears, writing under the name Nessmuk in Woodcraft and Camping, offers a more affectionate description than that image suggests, describing the ideal camp brew as "the sort of tea that takes hold, lifts the hair, and disposes the drinker to hilariousness." That's not a complaint. That's a man recommending his tea the way other men recommend a good used truck — almost certainly the green, gunpowder-style tea that dominated American cups at the time. (To learn about other important figures check out Influential Figures in Backpacking History)
The method behind that strength was blunt and entirely uninterested in your opinion: a scoop of loose leaf — roughly a tablespoon, about 3 grams — per cup, plus an extra scoop "for the pot," boiled directly in the water rather than steeped politely off to the side like some kind of houseguest. Run the numbers and the old-timers weren't exaggerating for effect. A scoop-per-cup ratio in a typical camp pot works out to something like 3.5–4 grams of leaf per 8 ounces of water — already in coffee's caffeine range — and because the leaves were boiled for an extended stretch rather than given a gentle 2–3 minute steep, extraction ran high. A normal cup of green tea, brewed properly, yields something like 20–45 milligrams of caffeine. Double the leaf and boil it hard, and you're plausibly looking at 60–100 milligrams a cup — solidly in drip-coffee territory — and some camp cooks pushed it further still, keeping the pot at a rolling boil for ten minutes or more for what was affectionately called "overboiled" tea, a phrase that does a lot of quiet, honest work.[5] It tasted like bitter tannin and unresolved ambition. It also worked, which — for a beverage that, at the time, had every right to consider itself coffee's equal — was really the only requirement that mattered.
Of course, being the dedicated researcher and manly outdoorsman I am, I had to try this old school tea recipe. The first sip arrived almost deceptively gentle — a soft, grassy nothing, coy about what it had in store. I'd taken it plain, the way a lumberjack would have: no sugar, no milk, nothing to cushion the blow. Then the aftertaste turned traitor. A bitterness crept in like wet cardboard dissolving on the tongue, sharp enough to pull my lips into an involuntary unmanly pucker, and my mouth went bone-dry — that unpleasant medicinal-cotton feeling of a mouth gone suddenly, uncomfortably parched. Underneath it all lingered something faintly sulfurous, like tea steeped with well water that had spent too long brooding underground. I expected the bitterness to fade in a minute or two, the way bad coffee does. Instead, it settled in for the long haul, coating the back of my throat for the better part of an hour — a low, chalky ghost of a beverage, unwilling to leave the premises. The next day, in the name of science and poor judgment, I tortured myself again, this time with sugar. A generous dose softened the bitterness, technically, but did nothing for the dry aftertaste, which remained parked at the back of my throat like it had signed a lease. This is a recipe best left to history and burley lumberjacks.
None of that old-timey camp tea arrived pre-strained. A delicate mesh or perforated tin tea steeper or strainer was one more tiny thing to break, lose, or clean with precious water supplies — an unacceptable liability in a life already full of axes. Camp cooks bypassed strainers entirely by relying on simple physics to keep leaves and coffee grounds out of their teeth, physics being free and widely available. There was no tea bag yet either, so getting the leaves back out of the pot required actual technique, and camp cooks developed a small toolkit of them, ranked roughly from showy to practical:
- Swinging the pot. The signature move, best documented in Australian "billy tea" culture but echoed in North American camps too: grab the pot by its handle and swing it in a full vertical circle over your head, using centrifugal force to fling the leaves to the bottom and sides so the clarified tea could be poured straight from the top. This was less a brewing technique than a demonstration — the kind of skill a dedicated camp cook performed as much for an audience as for the tea, roughly the 19th-century equivalent of flair bartending, and with similar odds of a mess. Writer Douglas Wood has treated this settling ritual, along with cousins like spoon-tapping and dropping an eggshell in the pot to draw the grounds down, as genuine camp folklore rather than mere technique — ceremony as much as craft.[6]
- Pouring off the leaves. The unglamorous default, and the choice of anyone who has ever burned themselves before breakfast: let the leaves settle to the bottom, then pour carefully, sometimes holding a spoon, lid, or flat plate at the pot's mouth to catch stray floaters on the way out.
- A scrap of cloth. Stretched over a cup or held between pot and cup, an old shirt or bit of cheesecloth caught both whole leaves and the finer sediment. In a camp without a dedicated strainer — which was most camps — this was the workhorse method, and a fairly firm argument for never asking too many questions about the shirt in question.
None of it required specialized gear. All of it required a person willing to fuss with hot tea leaves by firelight, which is really the whole story of American camp tea in miniature: not a lack of ingenuity, but ingenuity spent on technique rather than tools. Also, none of those methods are posh or feminine. There is no porcelain, milk, or sugar in camp. Only hot, black, bitter liquid, sometimes filtered through a highly questionable piece of old fabric that had, at some point, definitely been a shirt.
That toughness is worth dwelling on, because it cuts directly against the other myth this essay set out to retire. Tea's reputation as a dainty, feminine drink is a 20th-century invention, not an inherited truth, and somebody should really tell the lumberjacks. Chasing the female household shopper who did most of the era's grocery buying, tea advertisers in the early 20th century leaned hard into lace-and-porcelain imagery, and — by some accounts — went too far down this path leading to a slow shift that resulted in tea's modern feminine milieu. Coffee's own tough-guy image — black, unsweetened, served in a battered tin cup — got the same treatment from the opposite direction, manufactured by 20th-century advertising rather than discovered in the bean. Neither beverage was born gendered. Both simply got dressed by copywriters trying to move product, and tea got handed the worse outfit. (To read about coffee on the trail visit The History Of Backpacking Coffee Gear)
[Nesting Camp Cook Set, c. 1920s]
Survey 19th-century American camping equipment lists — pioneers, surveyors, prospectors, weekend campers alike — and the pattern holds steady, and steadily unglamorous: iron cookpots, frypans, tin pots and pails.[7] A dedicated teapot, in copper or tin, was common enough back home in American parlors and kitchens, where nobody was worried about pack weight. At camp, that same all-purpose pot made coffee, then made tea, crumbs and all — because, as one historical-reenactment discussion of 18th- and 19th-century gear bluntly concluded, most people camping outdoors weren't going to carry a proper tea kettle when a pot or tin cup did the job just as well.[8] Efficiency, it turns out, has always outranked etiquette in the woods.
[Turn of the century era copper tea kettle]
Tin was by far the dominant material of camp cookware, on the reasonable grounds that it was cheap and nobody cried if you dented it. Copper was also present but how popular it was is difficult to ascertain. What is clear is that it was more expensive. Not everyone skipped it, though. Campers who could afford one did sometimes bring a copper pot into the field — copper boiled water faster, resisted corrosion, and was durable enough to be repaired and handed down for decades, which made it as much an heirloom as a tool, and possibly the only camping item anyone has ever willed to a grandchild. But this was a comfort of the upper classes rather than a standard kit item. A 1900 issue of Field and Stream discussing camp equipment reflects exactly that split — copper for those who could justify the expense, tin for everyone else.[9] Cookware had its own small material hierarchy, largely split along class lines, because apparently nothing in America escapes that.
[Magazine ad for Sternau & Co. tea kettle, c. 1914]
[White Enamelware tea kettle, c. 1870s-1930s]
[blue and white speckled enamel tea kettle, c. 1970s]
[aluminum tea kettle w/ wooden handle and short spout, c. 1900s-1950s]
Camping-equipment catalogs of the era regularly featured tea kettles in a range of sizes and materials, with aluminum and enameled steel or tin the most common choices through the late 19th and 20th centuries. What distinguished these from an ordinary household kettle was packability: folding handles, short stubby spouts, and a deliberate emphasis on shaving off weight, ounce by grudging ounce. The materials have changed little down to the present.
Some of these designs got genuinely inventive, in the way that only a very specific kind of hobbyist gets inventive about a kettle. A early-century Sternau & Co. brass kettle included bottom vent fins engineered to capture more of the flame's heat and improve fuel efficiency — quietly anticipating Jetboil's whole selling point by more than half a century, and getting considerably less credit for it. It also shipped with a dedicated spirit burner, letting a camper brew tea mid-afternoon without bothering to build a full fire, a level of commitment to teatime that borders on the diplomatic. Dedicated spirit stoves were never standard camp equipment, but they turn up often enough to prove that tea drinkers were occasionally willing to carry specialized gear, ritual apparently being worth its weight in brass. Also, notice the short stubby spout which improved portability (above).
Even so, dedicated tea kettles were never the norm for non-mountaineering backpackers, then or now. They show up far more often in the kit of horse packers, canoe campers, and car campers — people who can afford the extra weight of a single-purpose tool because a horse, canoe, or trunk is doing the carrying for them. Anyone traveling on foot tended to default back to the versatile pot that could boil coffee, tea, or dinner with equal, unbothered indifference.
Even during the decades when tea and coffee were running neck and neck, the bulk of the era's engineering effort still went toward coffee, for reasons no one has ever satisfactorily explained. The percolator came along in its modern form in 1889, invented by Hanson Goodrich.[10, 11] Once companies began marketing camp-specific percolators in the 20th century, the percolator became the iconic campfire vessel, a bubbling glass-topped status symbol of a beverage that had, by then, essentially won by default. If a tea drinker wanted hot water at a campsite from that point forward, odds are they were boiling it in a pot designed and marketed entirely with coffee in mind, tea's presence in it purely incidental. This pattern held well into the 21st century, though it never fully crowded tea out of the picture. It is worth noting that outside America, the variety of tea preparation was far greater: tea was whisked in Japan, brewed gongfu-style in China, or churned with butter in Tibet.
Tea cultivation in the U.S. began near Charleston, South Carolina, in the 1790s, and continues today, although it has always remained in the shadow of imported varieties — a domestic underdog within an already underdog beverage. Even so, it helped cement tea as a staple beverage in the South. The earliest written sweet tea recipes appeared in Southern cookbooks starting in 1879 — the same year Housekeeping in Old Virginia was calling for green tea in its iced tea — with the version that became the regional standard published in 1928 in Henrietta Stanley Dull's Southern Cooking, by which point black tea had taken over, having quietly won the war of attrition while nobody was looking.[12, 13, 14]
Sweet tea became the dominant style for Americans in the 20th century. This has played a large role in keeping tea out of the campground, especially the backcountry camp, where a jug of syrup-sweet tea is a genuine liability. But don't doubt the ingenuity of campers or backpackers, who have never once let inconvenience stand between them and a beverage they were determined to have.
A 1923 issue of Outdoor Life recommended the vacuum-insulated bottle as "a growing necessity," noting that in summer it supplied "the camper with ice tea, iced fruit juice or cracked ice for drinking water in an otherwise sun-baked world," while in colder months it carried hot soup, coffee, chocolate, or milk without the bother of lighting a fire.[15] Tea, tellingly, gets listed right alongside coffee here, uninvited but unbothered — proof that tea never actually left the conversation, even when nobody was specifically asking for it. Sweet tea still finds its way into camp today, as we'll see shortly.
If one piece of technology quietly carried tea through its coming mid-century upheaval, it was the tea bag — not because anyone invented it with camping in mind, but because it accidentally solved camping's actual problem with tea: mess and equipment, the two things a tired person at the end of a long hike has the least patience for. The most commonly told origin traces to New York tea merchant Thomas Sullivan, who around 1908 began shipping tea samples in small silk sachets; customers, rather than opening the bags for the loose leaves inside, simply dropped the whole sachet in hot water, and the convenience stuck, as convenience generally does once people realize the alternative involves cloth.[16]
[Sternau & Co. tea kettle w/ vent fins and integrated spirit burner, c. 1930s]
[bottom view of a copper variant]
Even so, dedicated tea kettles were never the norm for non-mountaineering backpackers, then or now. They show up far more often in the kit of horse packers, canoe campers, and car campers — people who can afford the extra weight of a single-purpose tool because a horse, canoe, or trunk is doing the carrying for them. Anyone traveling on foot tended to default back to the versatile pot that could boil coffee, tea, or dinner with equal, unbothered indifference.
Even during the decades when tea and coffee were running neck and neck, the bulk of the era's engineering effort still went toward coffee, for reasons no one has ever satisfactorily explained. The percolator came along in its modern form in 1889, invented by Hanson Goodrich.[10, 11] Once companies began marketing camp-specific percolators in the 20th century, the percolator became the iconic campfire vessel, a bubbling glass-topped status symbol of a beverage that had, by then, essentially won by default. If a tea drinker wanted hot water at a campsite from that point forward, odds are they were boiling it in a pot designed and marketed entirely with coffee in mind, tea's presence in it purely incidental. This pattern held well into the 21st century, though it never fully crowded tea out of the picture. It is worth noting that outside America, the variety of tea preparation was far greater: tea was whisked in Japan, brewed gongfu-style in China, or churned with butter in Tibet.
Tea cultivation in the U.S. began near Charleston, South Carolina, in the 1790s, and continues today, although it has always remained in the shadow of imported varieties — a domestic underdog within an already underdog beverage. Even so, it helped cement tea as a staple beverage in the South. The earliest written sweet tea recipes appeared in Southern cookbooks starting in 1879 — the same year Housekeeping in Old Virginia was calling for green tea in its iced tea — with the version that became the regional standard published in 1928 in Henrietta Stanley Dull's Southern Cooking, by which point black tea had taken over, having quietly won the war of attrition while nobody was looking.[12, 13, 14]
Sweet tea became the dominant style for Americans in the 20th century. This has played a large role in keeping tea out of the campground, especially the backcountry camp, where a jug of syrup-sweet tea is a genuine liability. But don't doubt the ingenuity of campers or backpackers, who have never once let inconvenience stand between them and a beverage they were determined to have.
A 1923 issue of Outdoor Life recommended the vacuum-insulated bottle as "a growing necessity," noting that in summer it supplied "the camper with ice tea, iced fruit juice or cracked ice for drinking water in an otherwise sun-baked world," while in colder months it carried hot soup, coffee, chocolate, or milk without the bother of lighting a fire.[15] Tea, tellingly, gets listed right alongside coffee here, uninvited but unbothered — proof that tea never actually left the conversation, even when nobody was specifically asking for it. Sweet tea still finds its way into camp today, as we'll see shortly.
[Modern tea bag]
If one piece of technology quietly carried tea through its coming mid-century upheaval, it was the tea bag — not because anyone invented it with camping in mind, but because it accidentally solved camping's actual problem with tea: mess and equipment, the two things a tired person at the end of a long hike has the least patience for. The most commonly told origin traces to New York tea merchant Thomas Sullivan, who around 1908 began shipping tea samples in small silk sachets; customers, rather than opening the bags for the loose leaves inside, simply dropped the whole sachet in hot water, and the convenience stuck, as convenience generally does once people realize the alternative involves cloth.[16]
The fuller story is a little murkier — a Milwaukee-based patent for a similar "tea leaf holder" had already been filed in 1901 by Roberta C. Lawson and Mary Molaren, years before Sullivan's samples ever shipped — but Sullivan is the version that took hold in popular memory and, more importantly, in the marketplace, which is usually how these things get decided.[17] Once gauze and later paper versions went into mass production through the 1920s, tea no longer needed an infuser, a strainer, or a dedicated pot to steep cleanly. Any container that could hold hot water would do — a real convenience for green tea drinkers in the 1900s and 1910s, and later a lifeline for the black tea that replaced it once war cut the supply lines.
The tea bag meant a tea drinker could use exactly the same gear as a coffee drinker — the same pot, the same percolator — and still get a clean cup with zero specialized equipment, and zero of the ceremony that had defined camp tea for a century. In a real sense, the tea bag is the reason American camp-tea technology never had to become its own mainstream category: it let tea free-ride, comfortably, on coffee's infrastructure, which proved to be to its benefit as its sales took a back seat to coffee by the mid-20th century.
That convenience never quite killed off the dedicated kettle, though. Manufacturers kept making them in small numbers throughout the century, simply because tea aficionados kept asking for them — proof that the tea bag's ease never fully replaced the appeal of doing things properly, and that some people will always choose the harder, better tea.
Colin Fletcher — the closest thing backpacking has to a patron saint of gear obsession, a man who has opinions about socks — devotes real attention to tea preparation in The Complete Walker IV, admitting that even on backpacking trips he stopped mid-afternoon for a proper cup.[18] Despite decades in the United States, Fletcher never fully shed his British instincts on this point, though — somewhat to his own apparent surprise — he settled on Lipton bagged tea as his trail caffeine of choice, a brand no self-respecting British tea drinker would typically dignify with a second glance. Perhaps America rubbed off on him after all, one grocery-store tea bag at a time. Fletcher exemplifies the modern tea-obsessed camper, willing to trade a bit of pack weight for a reliable caffeine ritual and a small piece of home.
Fletcher lays out his options with real care, the way a man does when he has clearly thought about this far more than is strictly necessary. For hot tea on the trail, it's bagged, loose leaf, or the rarely-discussed instant tea powder, a category that exists mostly so people can say they've tried it once. For something cold, he tries powdered mixes like Crystal Light or Wyler's stirred into creek water — politely, but with clear reservations, the reservations of a man who knows better — and sun tea, a genuinely American invention where bagged tea steeps for hours in a clear bottle left in direct sunlight, no stove required, no effort expended, no complaints filed. By sheer coincidence, sun tea is a twentieth century invention that mirrors modern cold-soaking and is therefore easily adapted to the trail. Those last two methods are really backcountry versions of sweet tea, just cooled to whatever temperature the nearest creek happens to be rather than properly iced, and priced accordingly at zero dollars. (To see what other drinks campers have hydrated with see A Titillating Tail of Trail Hydration)
Today's trail-tea debates echo the ones coffee drinkers already have, right down to the moral tone. Tea bags, like disposable pour-over coffee bags, are convenient but leave a waste product that has to be packed out under leave-no-trace practice; ultralight purists tend to gravitate toward instant tea or powdered drink mixes for exactly that reason, weighing their tea options the way other people weigh mortgages; and loose-leaf devotees — the tea equivalent of the Moka pot coffee crowd — insist it's the only proper way to do it, strainer, spent leaves, and all, and will tell you so whether you asked or not. Having tried most of these approaches myself, I'll side with the loose-leaf purists on flavor. I'm also not above a Lipton bag on trail when the moment calls for speed over ceremony — which puts me, I suspect, in exactly the same camp as Fletcher, tea bag in one hand and quiet self-forgiveness in the other.
The tea bag meant a tea drinker could use exactly the same gear as a coffee drinker — the same pot, the same percolator — and still get a clean cup with zero specialized equipment, and zero of the ceremony that had defined camp tea for a century. In a real sense, the tea bag is the reason American camp-tea technology never had to become its own mainstream category: it let tea free-ride, comfortably, on coffee's infrastructure, which proved to be to its benefit as its sales took a back seat to coffee by the mid-20th century.
That convenience never quite killed off the dedicated kettle, though. Manufacturers kept making them in small numbers throughout the century, simply because tea aficionados kept asking for them — proof that the tea bag's ease never fully replaced the appeal of doing things properly, and that some people will always choose the harder, better tea.
Colin Fletcher — the closest thing backpacking has to a patron saint of gear obsession, a man who has opinions about socks — devotes real attention to tea preparation in The Complete Walker IV, admitting that even on backpacking trips he stopped mid-afternoon for a proper cup.[18] Despite decades in the United States, Fletcher never fully shed his British instincts on this point, though — somewhat to his own apparent surprise — he settled on Lipton bagged tea as his trail caffeine of choice, a brand no self-respecting British tea drinker would typically dignify with a second glance. Perhaps America rubbed off on him after all, one grocery-store tea bag at a time. Fletcher exemplifies the modern tea-obsessed camper, willing to trade a bit of pack weight for a reliable caffeine ritual and a small piece of home.
Fletcher lays out his options with real care, the way a man does when he has clearly thought about this far more than is strictly necessary. For hot tea on the trail, it's bagged, loose leaf, or the rarely-discussed instant tea powder, a category that exists mostly so people can say they've tried it once. For something cold, he tries powdered mixes like Crystal Light or Wyler's stirred into creek water — politely, but with clear reservations, the reservations of a man who knows better — and sun tea, a genuinely American invention where bagged tea steeps for hours in a clear bottle left in direct sunlight, no stove required, no effort expended, no complaints filed. By sheer coincidence, sun tea is a twentieth century invention that mirrors modern cold-soaking and is therefore easily adapted to the trail. Those last two methods are really backcountry versions of sweet tea, just cooled to whatever temperature the nearest creek happens to be rather than properly iced, and priced accordingly at zero dollars. (To see what other drinks campers have hydrated with see A Titillating Tail of Trail Hydration)
Today's trail-tea debates echo the ones coffee drinkers already have, right down to the moral tone. Tea bags, like disposable pour-over coffee bags, are convenient but leave a waste product that has to be packed out under leave-no-trace practice; ultralight purists tend to gravitate toward instant tea or powdered drink mixes for exactly that reason, weighing their tea options the way other people weigh mortgages; and loose-leaf devotees — the tea equivalent of the Moka pot coffee crowd — insist it's the only proper way to do it, strainer, spent leaves, and all, and will tell you so whether you asked or not. Having tried most of these approaches myself, I'll side with the loose-leaf purists on flavor. I'm also not above a Lipton bag on trail when the moment calls for speed over ceremony — which puts me, I suspect, in exactly the same camp as Fletcher, tea bag in one hand and quiet self-forgiveness in the other.
[Coleman 3 cup kettle w/ folding handle and integrated steeper basket, c. 1990s]
Camp-specific tea kettles, for their part, have never disappeared. Brands like Coleman, GSI, MSR, and Firemaple have quietly kept packable, lightweight trail kettles in their lineups for decades, even though the format never went mainstream and probably never will. Today, numerous options proliferate across the Internet. One brand, Keith Titanium, is quietly pushing the bounds of reason with a line of titanium tea kettles and even teacups with accompanying saucer (below). Tea aficionados still carry them deep into the backcountry, however impractical that looks to a stove-and-pot purist standing there with his one multipurpose pot, silently judging. It's not so different from the coffee lover who accepts a few extra ounces of pack weight just to have a Moka pot at camp — a small, willing tax paid for doing the ritual properly, and a tax the rest of us politely decline to pay.
[Keith Titanium, Ti3601, teacup w/ saucer and spoon, c. 2026]
American camping tea technology, in the end, isn't a story about a beverage losing early and limping along in coffee's shadow, whatever the Boston Tea Party mythology would have you believe. For most of the 19th century, tea — specifically green tea, sourced directly from Asia rather than through British hands, out of a stubbornness that has never really left the American character — was every bit coffee's equal, and the tea that showed up at lumberjack camps and frontier fires reflected that popularity, not some scrappy minority habit clinging on by its fingernails. What actually reshaped tea's fortunes was two world wars severing the transpacific trade that had fed it for a century, and a coffee industry that used the same period to lock in workplace rituals and military habits that have stuck ever since — the same period, not incidentally, that invented both tea's feminine reputation and coffee's tough-guy one, two marketing decisions still quietly shaping what people feel comfortable ordering.
Camping gear, for its part, mostly didn't care which beverage was winning — it was built around coffee's needs from the start, green tea or black, popular or not — though a persistent, minor tradition of dedicated tea kettles proves that "mostly" was never "entirely." What's left is a quieter kind of trail tradition than the "coffee always won" version suggests: a lumberjack's overboiled pot of gunpowder green, a scrap of cloth stretched over a tin cup, a Sternau kettle with its clever vent fins, and — decades after the supply lines changed everything — a British expat conceding, against his own expectations, that a Lipton bag would do just fine.
by David F. Garner
by David F. Garner
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1. Samantha Walsh, New-York Historical Society, "19th Century Americans & Tea," September 2, 2015, https://www.nyhistory.org/blogs/people-generally-are-improving-in-their-knowledge-of-good-tea-19th-century-americans-tea.
2. Harvard University DASH Repository, "A Brief History of Tea: The Rise and Fall of the Tea Importation Act," https://dash.harvard.edu/entities/publication/73120378-a060-6bd4-e053-0100007fdf3b.
3. Bruce Richardson, Boston Tea Party Ships & Museum, "History of Green Tea in America," accessed September 27, 2026, https://www.bostonteapartyship.com/history-of-green-tea.
4. U.S. Census Bureau, "National Hot Tea Month: January 2024," January 2024, https://www.census.gov/newsroom/stories/hot-tea-month.html.
5. Toby Richardson, Rough as Guts, "How to Make Billy Tea | An Australian Bush Tradition," accessed September 27, 2026, https://roughasguts.com.au/australiana/billy-tea-recipe/.
6. Douglas Wood, "Swinging the Coffee," accessed September 29, 2026, https://douglaswood.com/swinging-the-coffee/.
7. Gail Getz, Pennsylvania Heritage Magazine, "The Great Escape: Camping in the 19th Century," accessed October 1, 2026,
http://paheritage.wpengine.com/article/great-escape-camping-19th-century/.
8. The Muzzleloading Forum, "Copper tea kettle HC," March 28, 2025, accessed October 2, 2026, https://www.muzzleloadingforum.com/threads/copper-tea-kettle-hc.193485/.
9. Marstyn Pogue, “Moccasin Tracks,” Field and Stream, 1900-09, Vol. 5, Iss. 8, 477, Internet Archive, https://archive.org/details/sim_field-stream_1900-09_5_8.
10. Kate MacDonnell, Corner Coffee Store, "When Was the Coffee Percolator Invented? History, Facts & FAQ," accessed September 28, 2026, https://cornercoffeestore.com/when-was-coffee-percolator-invented/.
11. Mr. and Mrs. Brew, "Percolator Brewing - History and How To," The Brew Adventures, accessed October 2, 2026, Percolator Brewing - History and How To — The Brew Adventures.
12. Sean Powers, Georgia Public Broadcasting, "Sweet Tea: A History Of The 'Nectar Of The South'," June 9, 2016, https://gpbnews.org/post/sweet-tea-history-nectar-south;
13. Royal Cup Coffee and Tea, "A Southern Treat: The History Behind Sweet Tea," July 30, 2019, https://www.royalcupcoffee.com/blog/articles/southern-treat-history-behind-sweet-tea;
14. Jessica Chambers, The Daily Meal, "The Not-So-Southern Origins Of Sweet Tea,"
https://www.thedailymeal.com/1336785/origins-sweet-tea/.
15. Claude P. Fordyce, “Week-end Outings,” Outdoor Life, 1923-09, Vol. 52, Iss. 3, p. 206, Internet Archive, https://archive.org/details/sim_outdoor-life_1923-09_52_3.
16. UK Tea and Infusions Association, "The History of the Tea Bag," accessed October 4, 2026, https://www.tea.co.uk/the-history-of-the-tea-bag.
17. Kat Eschner, Smithsonian Magazine, "Ever Wonder Who Invented the Tea Bag?," December 15, 2016, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/ever-wonder-who-invented-tea-bag-180961469/.
18. Colin Fletcher, The Complete Walker IV (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002), 419.
Sources
1. Samantha Walsh, New-York Historical Society, "19th Century Americans & Tea," September 2, 2015, https://www.nyhistory.org/blogs/people-generally-are-improving-in-their-knowledge-of-good-tea-19th-century-americans-tea.
2. Harvard University DASH Repository, "A Brief History of Tea: The Rise and Fall of the Tea Importation Act," https://dash.harvard.edu/entities/publication/73120378-a060-6bd4-e053-0100007fdf3b.
3. Bruce Richardson, Boston Tea Party Ships & Museum, "History of Green Tea in America," accessed September 27, 2026, https://www.bostonteapartyship.com/history-of-green-tea.
4. U.S. Census Bureau, "National Hot Tea Month: January 2024," January 2024, https://www.census.gov/newsroom/stories/hot-tea-month.html.
5. Toby Richardson, Rough as Guts, "How to Make Billy Tea | An Australian Bush Tradition," accessed September 27, 2026, https://roughasguts.com.au/australiana/billy-tea-recipe/.
6. Douglas Wood, "Swinging the Coffee," accessed September 29, 2026, https://douglaswood.com/swinging-the-coffee/.
7. Gail Getz, Pennsylvania Heritage Magazine, "The Great Escape: Camping in the 19th Century," accessed October 1, 2026,
http://paheritage.wpengine.com/article/great-escape-camping-19th-century/.
8. The Muzzleloading Forum, "Copper tea kettle HC," March 28, 2025, accessed October 2, 2026, https://www.muzzleloadingforum.com/threads/copper-tea-kettle-hc.193485/.
9. Marstyn Pogue, “Moccasin Tracks,” Field and Stream, 1900-09, Vol. 5, Iss. 8, 477, Internet Archive, https://archive.org/details/sim_field-stream_1900-09_5_8.
10. Kate MacDonnell, Corner Coffee Store, "When Was the Coffee Percolator Invented? History, Facts & FAQ," accessed September 28, 2026, https://cornercoffeestore.com/when-was-coffee-percolator-invented/.
11. Mr. and Mrs. Brew, "Percolator Brewing - History and How To," The Brew Adventures, accessed October 2, 2026, Percolator Brewing - History and How To — The Brew Adventures.
12. Sean Powers, Georgia Public Broadcasting, "Sweet Tea: A History Of The 'Nectar Of The South'," June 9, 2016, https://gpbnews.org/post/sweet-tea-history-nectar-south;
13. Royal Cup Coffee and Tea, "A Southern Treat: The History Behind Sweet Tea," July 30, 2019, https://www.royalcupcoffee.com/blog/articles/southern-treat-history-behind-sweet-tea;
14. Jessica Chambers, The Daily Meal, "The Not-So-Southern Origins Of Sweet Tea,"
https://www.thedailymeal.com/1336785/origins-sweet-tea/.
15. Claude P. Fordyce, “Week-end Outings,” Outdoor Life, 1923-09, Vol. 52, Iss. 3, p. 206, Internet Archive, https://archive.org/details/sim_outdoor-life_1923-09_52_3.
16. UK Tea and Infusions Association, "The History of the Tea Bag," accessed October 4, 2026, https://www.tea.co.uk/the-history-of-the-tea-bag.
17. Kat Eschner, Smithsonian Magazine, "Ever Wonder Who Invented the Tea Bag?," December 15, 2016, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/ever-wonder-who-invented-tea-bag-180961469/.
18. Colin Fletcher, The Complete Walker IV (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002), 419.