I'm Canadian and we have a long heritage with English things .... especially tea. But our brothers and sisters are American so we have a lot of overlap in our culture.

I grew up in northern Ontario in an indigenous community. Mom and dad were traditional people who were born and raised in the bush. They lived on your old English black tea. We treated it like a survival food and basically cooked it like it was coffee. All my life tea was made by boiling water in a large metal 4 litre tea pot and once there was a rolling boil, you dropped in eight tea bags and let it bubble for a minute until it all turned into a deep reddish liquid. The best tea was always in the first half an hour, after that it was like drinking a really strong coffee.

I drank that from the time I was a baby ... really! I remember seeing mom fill a baby bottle with warm tea, canned milk and a bit of sugar and feed it to my baby brothers. I assume she did the same to me.

Once I started living away from home, I drank less tea and more coffee. But I always love my black tea.

Never order it in a restaurant in Canada. Half the time a cheap little restaurant will just use hot tap water and drop the shittiest tea bag thats been sitting on the shelf for years to make your brew.

The only public place to get good tea is at Tim Hortons, the Canadian coffee chain. They actually make the kind of tea I grew up with, really strong brewed tea that is kept fresh regularly. Their coffee is shit but their tea is excellent .... at least to me.