The Beverage The Beatles Always Had Waiting For Them Backstage (It Wasn't Alcohol)

While the Beatles were certainly no strangers to alcohol, it appears that their backstage beverage of choice may not have had any booze in it. In a 1965 story for Playboy, journalist Jean Shepherd joined the Beatles for a stretch of shows in the UK, and often spent time with them in the dressing room. Every stop felt the same, he wrote, with the dressing rooms themselves having the same food items at every stop, including trays of French fries, steak, and pots of tea.

The lads were often seen enjoying a cuppa, so much so that there's even a zine, The Teatles, dedicated to compiling photos of them with tea. Comedian and Beatles historian Martin Lewis also found that tea just so happened to be the drink the Beatles mentioned the most in their lyrics. In fact, according to Lewis's study, the band wrote a total of five songs referencing tea in a span of just three months.

It makes a lot of sense that the Beatles would drink so much of it — they were as British as you could get, and tea is an integral part of their culture. While it isn't clear what specific tea they kept in their dressing rooms, odds are it was a type of black tea, since 71% of Brits prefer it over herbal or green teas (via World Tea News). Drinking black tea every day comes with numerous health benefits, so it's nice to know that the Fab Four likely always had access to it on the road.

As if needing pots of it backstage wasn't enough to prove the Beatles' appreciation for tea, Paul McCartney and John Lennon's friendship involved a fairly unusual experience with it. During an appearance on Aspen & Co. in 1984, McCartney shared a little about their oddball ritual of smoking tea leaves.

"We'd go to my house when my dad was out at work, and we'd just sit around in the front parlor of my house and smoke Typhoo tea in my dad's pipe," McCartney said. Typhoo is a British tea brand that's been around since 1903. "We were teenage fools, and we wanted to sit at home and do big grown-up things. So, I found my dad's pipe, and then we didn't have anything to load it with, so we got the Typhoo out."

Thankfully, the two Beatles took their tea properly in later years. Lennon, for one, finally learned how to make tea the "correct" way — pour the water into the cup first, and then you put in the tea bags — in 1980, according to Yoko Ono, writing for the New York Times in 2010. McCartney, on the other hand, takes his tea these days with soy milk and sugar (via paulmccartney.com). Let's just hope he adds milk to the tea in the right order; pouring the milk in only after the tea finishes brewing preserves more of the latter's health benefits.