Long before shorts, talls, pumpkin lattes, and frothy half-caf frappuccinos, America was a nation of tea totallers.

Colonists drank black tea with abandon, renouncing it only when Britain’s unjust taxes inspired the Founding Fathers to dump their tea into the ocean. Tea didn’t completely disappear, but it was eclipsed by another caffeinated beverage. “Coffee was closer and cheaper in the 1800s,” says Mark Pendergrast, author of Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World. Unlike tea leaves, beans could be obtained from the ­Caribbean or from Latin America.

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It’s taken two centuries for tea to make a comeback, but over the past few years, the market has changed. From 1990 to 2006, wholesale tea sales more than tripled to an estimated $6.5 billion, according to the Tea Association of the U.S.A. And that’s not all bottles of Snapple. Sales of high-priced “specialty teas,” which start around $5 per ­quarter-pound and can cost thousands, grew more than 250 percent from 1990 to 2006. The Tea Association expects sales to increase 10 percent annually over the next few years.

Starbucks may not have a tea salon on every other corner, but this phenomenon expands beyond home brewing. (And the coffee chain did acquire Tazo in 1999.) The Park Hyatt Hotel in Washington, for example, has built a special tea cellar, stocking it with more than 50 rare varie­ties. The highlight of the collection is a selection of fermented and aged Pu-erh, a specialty of China’s Yunnan province that speculators trade for tens of thousands of dollars. At the Park Hyatt, a Pu-erh from 1985 costs $300 a pot—making your venti latte look like a relative bargain.

Before you take a $10 sip, try these tips on navigating the world of tea:

The Herbal Remedy
At a store, you may see dozens of varieties of tea—many of which are not technically tea. Tea is made from the leaves of the ­evergreen shrub Camellia sinensis, which grows in mountainous regions around the world. Herbal teas, also called tisanes, are made from the flowers, roots, or leaves of other plants, like chamomile or mint. They usually don’t contain caffeine and aren’t considered tea by connoisseurs.

By the Bag
More than half of all tea sold in the U.S. comes in bags, according to the Tea Association. Bags are usually a sign of low quality, since they can hold broken leaves or leaf dust, says David Gregersen, tea-cellar manager at the Park Hyatt. But over the past few years, companies have introduced higher-quality tea bags. Tea Forté, for one, fills its silky, pyramid-shaped bags with whole leaves.