One of my favourite readers and bloggers recently asked me about tea and beer in India. Talk about a study in contrasts.

India is rightfully famous for its tea (or chai). It’s served in every restaurant, home, and railway station - the tea-seller call of “chaaiiii, chaaiii” is one of my archetypal memories of catching trains in India. The standard version is a milky sweet tea, but my favourite was masala (spiced) chai, which is laced with sweet-smelling spices like green cardamon, clove, nutmeg, mace and dry ginger.

If drinking tea is a national pastime in India, growing tea is a national industry. Tea is cultivated in India’s cooler hill regions, such as Assam in the North East and Tamil Nadu in the South East.

We spent a few days in a tea-growing area called Udhagamandala (or Ooty) in the Nilgiri Hills in Tamil Nadu. There we visited the Tea Factory, a small scale tea processing plant which offers tours and maintains a small but highly interesting museum. Among other things, we discovered:

• India is the highest consumer of tea in the world, and the third largest producer.
• The word ‘tips’ comes from the phrase “To ensure prompt service” - the practice was started in English tea gardens where customers could pay extra to ensure that their tea was brought out quickly while it was still hot.
• Tea was allegedly invented when stray leaves fell into a pot of water that a Chinese Emperor happened to be boiling.

By contrast to tea, Indian beer is a total disappointment, particularly if you’re used to the lovely light local beers that are par for the course throughout the rest of South East Asia.

The leading Indian beer brand is Kingfisher, but some bars also stock another local brand called Haywards 5000 and locally brewed versions of Fosters.

Most restaurants and small bars only offer beer by the bottle. This is annoying because bottled beer made in India has glycerol added to it. A couple of tastings was enough to confirm our initial suspicions that any chemical used as an active ingredient in soap or as an anti-freeze in car radiators has no business in beer. Not only does the glycerol cause huge bubbles to form in the beer, it gives you a headache the next morning out of all proportion to the amount of beer you consumed the previous night. It also seemed to make the beer taste funny, but this may have been psychosomatic on my part. After a few disappointing forays into Indian beer, I decided that if it wasn’t available by the tap I’d stick to tea.

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