How they drink it: Green tea is, of course, king, though oolong is also popular and black tea, usually served as "milk tea"note , is sometimes drunk in cafes and in bottled form. Tea ceremony aside, the most common form of tea served in Japan is brewed loose-leaf sencha, though tea bags and instant tea are also increasingly popular for their convenience and cheapness after the economic bubble burst. Even though Japan is famous for its tea ceremony, as with the Brits, everyday tea drinking is a much humbler affair there, with loose-leaf sencha or tea bags served in mugs. Having been isolationist for the greater part of its history and having limited space for farmland, the Japanese came up with a variety of inventive ways to stretch the green tea supply, including genmaicha (tea mixed with toasted rice), kukicha (a nutty-tasting tea that includes the stems and twigs from the leftovers of matcha and sencha production) and hojicha (lower grade tea than sencha, called bancha, that has been roasted over charcoal for flavor). Nowadays, Japan supplements their local supply with Chinese imports as well. Because tea is so popular, hot water boilers and the electric kettles that the Brits are so fond of are ubiquitous in Japanese kitchens and offices. They're also handy for making instant ramen.
India and Neighbors
For years, the Indians knew about tea and had access to tea plants, but thought of tea mostly as a medicinal herb. For better or worse, it was the British who were responsible for turning India into the tea-growing juggernaut it is today, smuggling techniques and plant cuttings out of China (under pain of death if they got caught) and learning to cultivate the Indian tea varietal as well. British colonial rule ended in the 1940s but chai remains a big deal, especially in the famous Assam and Darjeeling growing regions. How They Drink It: British-style with milk (although unlike the UK and rather like Hong Kong, the milk is often evaporated milk) and sugar, and in a variety of Indian preperations involving various combinations of spices and herbs. Of those, masala chai is the best known, including black tea and a variety of spices among which cardamom, ginger and sometimes black pepper feature prominantly, but there's also kahwah, green tea with almonds and spices originating in the Kashmir region, and noon chai, also from Kashmir, featuring cardamom, pistachio, a pinch of salt and a pink color produced by adding baking soda. However it's mixed, the Indian customs differ from the British in that they make tea by boiling everything - milk, tea and sugar - in the same pot. (An exception: Darjeeling tea, though sold as black, actually tends to be less oxidized and technically an oolong. This "champagne of teas" in its pure form needs no adulterations; do note however that a lot of what is sold as "Darjeeling tea", especially cheap stuff, is either not actually from Darjeeling or blended with a lot of cheaper tea.)
Roadside tea vendors called chai wallahs line many Indian streets. Since roadside tea stalls are limited in the number of utensils they can use, the vendor usually uses just one pot to make lots of cups. He starts a pot, and starts vending the tea. When the supply becomes low, he simply adds more water, sugar, tea and milk into the pot. He keeps on adjusting the ingredients as he goes along while using the color of the tea as a guide to tell him when the tea is "done". This has an added advantage for the chai wallah because the batches after the first one require less tea. This style of tea is called Kadak (literally "hard") because the end result is generally stronger. A lot of people who are used to drinking Kadak chai mimic this by slow boiling the tea after adding the milk. Most of India's neighbor countries including Pakistan and Bangladesh, also enjoy the various chai styles. The Kashmiri-origin teas in particular are also popular in Pakistan (which claims all of Kashmir and has de facto control over a substantial chunk of it).
USA and The Americas
It used to be the case that finding a good cup of tea in the USA was an uncertain proposition. Despite being ex-British citizens their fondness for French and other continental European cultures after their break-up and access to relatively cheap coffee in Central and South America eventually cemented the USA's status as a coffee culture. That said, for a long time what tea culture remained (mostly among the upper class) was the British black tea sort. The accidental invention of the tea bag by a New Yorker in 1907 didn't help any, ensuring this was the only form of tea most Americans would ever see on grocery store shelves. The main exception was in the Deep South, where a tea culture all its own formed around iced sweet tea, which many non-Southerners decry as being too sweet. Fortunately for tea lovers, this is changing. In the last 20 years, tea has been experiencing a resurgence - green and oolong have made their way to the mainstream market, coffee shops have started serving full leaf, and specialty tea retail is a growing business. British tourists still think it's naff by comparison. Chinese and Japanese restaurants have also long been good places to get oolong and green tea, respectively.
How They Drink It: Being the melting pot of immigrants that it is, almost every tea fad from both sides of the globe has found an American niche. But American tea culture is still dominated by iced tea. The line of preference for sweetened or unsweetened is drawn north of Virginia and west of Texas. Lemon is the most common addition to either, but a variety of fruit flavors are enjoyed, and lately a drink called the Arnold Palmer (half iced tea and half lemonade, sometimes called Half and Half, named after the golfer) has exploded in popularity. Hot tea is usually sweetened to preference, unless you've grown sophisticated enough in tea taste to look down on it. Milk is also a matter of personal preference. The inhabitants of the United States have also been known to brew tea by throwing it into the nearest harbor.
The American Revolution was set off in part by tea. The Boston Tea Party occurred due to Parliament assuming it could tax the colonies without their say so, although, ironically, the final straw was lowering the tax on tea with the Tea Act, making it cheaper than tea smuggled in or imported legally from elsewhere, upsetting the smugglers and merchants who weren't in on the deal, who were the ones who actually dressed up and threw the legal tea into the harbor, then convinced most Americans that they were protesting a tax increase. Since most Americans bought from a smuggler (either directly or not) they had no clue as to what real prices were, so they bought the whole thing and followed the smugglers' lead. Consequently, the Intolerable Acts were enacted after several hundred pounds of tea were destroyed. The Intolerable Acts led to much chaos, protest, and generally warlike tendencies within the colonies. Soon, the British decided it was a good idea to seize the arsenal in Concord, Massachusetts. The result was the Battles of Lexington and Concord, which ignited the American Revolution. The reason coffee tends to be so much more popular than tea in America is mainly due to tea being associated with British imperialism - during the American Revolution, it was popular to give up tea in favor of coffee as a symbolic act of defiance; after the War of 1812, coffee's popularity stuck. Of course, this really pissed off the tea smugglers that started the whole thing...until they realized that they could ship other stuff just as well, and it wouldn't be illegal anymore (at least until the US developed native industries...). Several towns in New England used to use to choose their new ministers with tea. An example of a loaded question, a candidate was considered too passionate for the job if he took his tea with both milk and sugar.
Foreign countries (or for that matter, anywhere north of Virginia or west of Texas) are hell for a Southerner used to drinking iced sweet tea. On the other hand, Northerners are often put off by the amount of sugar in Southern sweet tea (one recipe that makes a sweet tea that is in the mid-range of sweetness calls for a 1:8 ratio of sugar to water), and usually prefer their iced tea to be unsweetened or fruit-sweetened.
In the South sweet tea is very Serious Business. The Georgia House of Representatives put forward a bill making it a misdemeanor to sell tea without the option of sweet tea in restaurants. Turns out it was an April Fools joke.
Sweet tea is a point of culture clash between the South and New Orleans, a southern-situated city with a more international culture. As a rule New Orleans brew it unsweetened and point out that it can be sweetened to taste, but sweet tea drinkers insist that sugar must be brewed with the tea. Since it's Serious Business as noted, dining venues along major tourist routes come under the pressure to provide tea brewed sweet. (When Southerner Alton Brown rode through New Orleans for his Feasting On Asphalt docu-series, this was a source of considerable astoundment.)
Serious business indeed: this space used to contain the accounts of Southern Tropers arguing over how to add the sugar to sweet tea - whether to add it while the tea was hot (claiming it added flavor from the sugar slightly caramelizing) or as sugar syrup when cold.
Tea and sugar brewed together can be made sweeter than tea with sugar added later, due to supersaturation. Sugar doesn't dissolve well in tea after it's been iced, either—there's nothing quite like the shock of having wet sugar granules slide in your mouth as you take your final swig.