The other day, I stopped at a coffee chain for a cup of tea. I needed a break, some peace and quiet, something to look at besides the four walls of my office. Skipping their more “creative” offerings—soy chai latte, whipped blackberry green tea—I ordered Darjeeling, then sat down at a little café table. As people click-clacked on their laptops and chatted on cell phones around me, I held my steaming paper cup of tea in two hands and sipped through the little hole in its plastic top. It felt thoroughly…uncivilized! That’s simply no way to drink tea.

I should have known better. Civilized tea drinking isn’t my birthright—I’m not English or Indian or Japanese—but lately I’ve had some tea-drinking experiences that set the bar where it ought to be: high. Then again, it’s not surprising that spots known for coffee are getting in on the tea game, even if they aren’t equipped to serve it properly or provide a soothing atmosphere in which to drink it. I’m not sure whether it’s coffee fatigue, the news that tea has substantial health benefits, or just the realization that, in this crazy world, tea provides a lovely time-out, but for some reason, a kind of tea mania is sweeping the country. There hasn’t been this much fuss since 342 crates of it were dumped into Boston Harbor.

I come from a family of people fiercely devoted to coffee, but I married into a tea family—or, more accurately, my marriage came with a mother-in-law who possesses a certain snobbishness about tea. I learned this early when, to celebrate my wedding, she threw a traditional high tea party in my honor at the Peninsula Hotel in Beverly Hills. (High tea is a late-afternoon / early evening meal where the beverage of choice is tea—sort of a classy version of happy hour.) In a private room, our own personal waitstaff served Earl Grey in china cups accompanied by an assortment of crustless sandwiches (tarragon egg salad, smoked salmon with lemon cream cheese) and sweets (scones, lemon cake, tiny fruit tarts). There was, of course, clotted cream on the side.

My mother-in-law grew up in New York, and I had visions of her taking tea at the Plaza, like Eloise, at an early age. But actually that wasn’t the case at all. In her Brooklyn household—and in just about every other Russian Jewish household at the time—the adults drank a kosher black tea called Swee-Touch-Nee. They drank it in glasses with a metal spoon standing up inside to keep the hot tea from shattering the glass, and with a sugar cube tucked inside their cheeks. Charming in its own right, though hardly high tea. “So how did you become an aficionado of the English tradition?” I asked her. “I read about it in books,” said my mother-in-law, a lover of British literature.

More people in the world drink tea than any other beverage except water. Most of that is tea from the evergreen shrub Camellia sinensis, of which there are four basic varieties: black, green, white, and oolong. Basically, what makes them different is the processing. The leaves are fermented to produce black tea, which is the most popular worldwide, and they’re unfermented for green and white teas, and semifermented for oolong tea. But that’s just the beginning. The flavor of a tea is dependent on many factors, including where the leaves were grown and how they were blended.

We Americans tend to like our tea on ice. Of the 50 billion servings of tea we drank in 2005, 85 percent were iced. But hot tea is gaining in popularity, particularly now that we know how good it is for us. For a long time, the teas most associated with health were herbal teas, which in fact aren’t really teas at all (they’re infusions of the bark, leaves, seeds, and flowers from other plants). But now studies are showing that green and black teas have about ten times the antioxidants of fruits and vegetables, and some research indicates that people who drink two cups or more of black tea per day have a lower risk of heart disease and stroke. Both black and green teas seem to boost the immune system and protect against skin cancer and some kinds of digestive cancer. Research is being done to see if these teas might help prevent a few other types of cancer, too. John Harney, the owner of wholesale company Harney & Sons Fine Tea, once told me that after being diagnosed with bladder cancer, he began drinking two cups of sencha (a form of steam-fired, basket-dried green tea) every morning. He was convinced that it kept the cancer from returning.

Tea’s wellness benefits are probably the reason it has also seeped into a range of products, even those where you’d least expect it, like—believe it or not—deodorant. There’s now tea in candy, among other foods, and, on the theory that the same antioxidants that prevent disease may also help repair the skin and hair, tea mania has hit the beauty industry hard. According to the World Tea Expo, in 2004, 83 new skincare products and 114 new hair care products included tea on their ingredients list. Walk into any cosmetics department and you can see for yourself: Origins White Tea masks, lip balms, and body creams; Elizabeth Arden Green Tea scent spray, shower gel, and deodorant; Aubrey Organics Green Tea shampoo. Spas are offering tea-infused services, too. Spa Fusion in San Francisco, for example, has a page-long menu of green tea treatments, including a bath, massage, facial, manicure, and pedicure.

Whether tea enhances the inherent pleasure of a facial or massage, or improves the age-fighting ability of a body cream, is hard to say for certain. The tea-spiked lotion I tried was pleasant enough, but didn’t seem to hold the fountain of youth. It seems to me that if you buy into the idea—and I do—that stress and worry age you faster than anything else, then sitting down to a nice, hot cup of tea rather than slathering it on still ranks as the best antiaging treatment around.

I’ve come to learn that the English-style high tea is just one way to enjoy the experience. A few years ago, the Asia Society and Japan Society in New York staged an exhibition called “The New Way of Tea” to celebrate a tea ceremony known as chanoyu. Chanoyu, which means “hot water for tea,” has been a fixture of Japanese life since the fifteenth century, and the ceremony is based on simplicity plus four principles: harmony, respect, purity, and tranquility. It’s held in an unadorned room using simple utensils and is carried out with formal, precisely ordered steps. When the guests leave the tearoom, the host sits alone to appreciatively contemplate the gathering. I want to try it at home, but the American in me is still searching for the perfect “simple” Japanese teacups (let alone an unadorned room).

Last year I got a taste of what it’s like to have tea the Moroccan way. I wasn’t in Morocco, but in Barcelona, where my sister was living at the time. We were invited to join a group of Catalan women for dinner at a Cuban restaurant, then for tea at a Moroccan club (how international we felt!). Under a tent the size of a supermarket parking lot, we sat on soft chairs and cozy couches around a low table with a hookah for those who smoke tobacco, which, in Spain, is everyone except Americans. A server came around and poured mint tea into pastel gilt-embellished glasses. I’ve always disliked mint tea, but now I know it was because I never really had mint tea. The bags you drop into a mug are a world away from a just-brewed pot that’s been steeped with fresh mint. That night, as music blared and a belly dancer swayed her way around the room, I refilled my glass again and again.

Admittedly, this wasn’t the calm, peaceful way I associate with the proper way to enjoy tea, but it was no less uplifting. And there does seem to be a movement to liven up the tea experience. Some places, including the Boston Park Plaza Hotel and the Park Hyatt in Chicago, now employ tea sommeliers in their cafés. So does Tavalon Tea Bar in downtown Manhattan, which also has a DJ spinning tunes. The shop sells upwards of 25 teas displayed in test tubes so you can sniff before you buy. On the West Coast, at Elixir Tonics & Teas, a little island of serenity just a stone’s throw from the hot spots where Hollywood dealmakers ply their trade, the teas are in lacquered bowls. They’re so fragrant and look so beautiful that you could easily mistake them for potpourri. The shop feeds into a garden, where you can sit and sip from a real (not paper!) cup, imagining yourself in the countryside in Surrey or Norfolk, away from the traffic-choked streets of L.A.

Whereas coffee drinking, if you’ll excuse the pun, plays into the daily grind—get your caffeine hit so you can survive the frenetic day to come—tea drinking slows you down. (Tea, by the way, does have plenty of caffeine, but less than coffee, and it seems to deliver a mellower hit.) It’s sophisticated, which is why I think young girls seem to like tea parties so much, either the humble homegrown variety or out on the town. Girls—and their dolls—can now have a grown-up afternoon tea at the American Girl Place emporiums in Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago. At Olivia’s Dollhouse Tea Room, a chain in California and Nevada (and soon, Arizona), it’s less sophisticated, more fantas-tea. The tearooms are decked out in Victorian frippery, and the girls dress up in princess finery before sitting down to teapots of lemonade and nibbles of mini hot dogs and heart-shaped cheese slices.

Anna, my friend Kate’s 8-year-old daughter, is known for her playdate tea parties. Kate, a tea lover ever since she visited Mariage Frères, the centuries-old oasis in the Marais section of Paris with a selection of more than 500 teas from around the world, has made an art of kid-friendly teas. She collects unusual sweets—chocolate crayons and koala bear cookies with strawberry centers from Japanese markets; peach-flavored gummy penguins from a neighborhood boutique candy shop; foot-long orange-blossom and lemon marshmallow sticks from a kitchen supply store. “It’s nice for the kids to have something for an after-school snack other than a bag of soy crisps,” says Kate, whose health consciousness is evident, too: She pairs the sweet bits with chunks of fruit skewered on paper umbrellas, prepares bite-size pieces of cheese speared with flag toothpicks and scoops up some tiny bowls of popcorn. It’s all served on an Italian pottery tea set she bought at a garage sale. Lemonade, preferably pink, fills the teapot.

I already have plans to introduce my own daughter, now just 2, to the pleasures of tea. When she is old enough to sit still (and I keep praying that will be any day now), we’ll be going to the Rose Garden Tea Room at the Huntington Library near Pasadena. The tearoom overlooks an acre of roses, and you help yourself to savory and sweet buffets (guess where the kids gravitate?). Egg and watercress, smoked salmon and dill, as well as cucumber-mint sandwiches are served, plus miniature chocolate éclairs and my favorite, High Tea Lemon Cookies. It’s indubitably civilized. Maybe I’ll invite my mother-in-law.

Daryn Eller is a freelance writer who lives in Venice, California.