The US currently seems to be enjoying a tea party to which Britain has not been invited, with tea bars popping up across the nation and sales of the hot drink shooting up 15% in the past five years. Even Drake has invested in a New York-based matcha bar – with a hip-hop-sounding ethos: “Good things come to those who hustle.”

So where are the UK’s tea bars? In 2015, we spent £654m on having a cuppa. According to the UK Tea and Infusions Association, Brits drink 95m more cups of char every day than they do coffee. But while it’s barely possible to walk down a British high street without passing roughly 75 Costas, Neros or Starbucks, there is no chain dedicated to the UK’s most popular hot drink.

Basic technology is one reason Brits haven’t fallen over themselves to open hot beverage-based venues known as “bars”. “A big difference between the UK and the US is that we have kettles – in the US they would never think of making tea at home,” says Sebastian Michaelis, a master blender for Tetley whose tastebuds are insured for £1m. “It makes it the opposite of coffee culture. It’s not about grabbing a quick caffeine hit while you’re on the go – it’s something you enjoy taking the time to make, so that you can switch off.”

Our view of what tea is doesn’t help either. For most Brits, “tea” means “hot water added to a bag that costs slightly more than a penny chew”. Paying £3 for it in a cafe seems foolish. “Our view of tea as just blended black tea has definitely hampered tea bars,” agrees Dr Tim Bond of the Tea Advisory Panel – a body dedicated to promoting the health benefits of a cuppa. “Whereas coffee chains have been able to convince people that their machinery makes a better drink than people can at home.”

Traditional ideas about tea are changing, especially among millennials Photograph: Getty Images/rhinoneal

Traditional ideas about tea are changing, though. While we drink more of it than any other hot beverage, consumption has been falling since the mid-70s. This is especially pronounced in millennials, who are turning instead to herbal or green teas (whose sales grew by 31% and 50% respectively between 2012 and 2014 – while black tea slumped 13%). Last week Tesco announced that it would be removing 16 traditional teas by Typhoo and PG Tips in favour of options such as Pukka Tea’s Blackcurrant Beauty.

It hasn’t gone unnoticed, with experts starting to predict that the popularity of alternative teas might lead to tea bars finally taking off. “Now that people are getting interested in different flavours of tea, it’s all going to change,” says Bond. “It creates an opportunity for places that people can use to sample different varieties, like they do with coffee bars. It’s a very good time to look again at getting people to drink tea outside of their homes.”

In London, that’s what’s happening. Jarr, a bar dedicated to the fermented tea drink kombucha, opened on the site of a Hackney brewery last November. In the past two years there has been the opening of a smattering of tea bars such as Amanzi, where, with its range of more than 100 teas, matcha lattes and habit of serving English breakfast tea in a glass, the owners hope to “excite and engage people by exploring the possibilities of tea”. As yet, however, they haven’t spread like wildfire.

“The problem is that a lot of people try to make tea work in a coffee shop-style environment full of exposed brickwork and hard seating, which just isn’t very cosy,” says Alex Holland, who researched his recently opened Brew “tea pub” via 130 interviews about hot beverages. “We found that when people drink tea they want to drink it somewhere that’s warm and welcoming – which is why we offer it in a pub.”

Holland’s tea pub also focuses on showcasing the benefits of loose leaf over tea bags by offering a small range of largely black teas that can be drunk with milk and sugar. “When you get these places that offer more than 100 teas, they scare people into ordering coffee,” he says. Which, makes a lot of sense. There does seem something fundamentally strange about the idea of turning a nice cup of tea into an over-fussy, faddy experience: it goes against the down-to-earth quality that we want from a cuppa. If tea bars are to take off in Britain, is keeping them pretension-free what it will take? “Yeah,” says Holland. “It also helps that we offer alcoholic tea cocktails and beer. That helps sway people.”

Now there’s an idea that might help tea bars take off: actually being bars.