Received wisdom – the kind often delivered in Received Pronunciation – tells us that coffee is sexier than tea. A good roast is hot, dark and tweaks your body chemistry in naughty ways. It’s also, essentially, bad for you. And what could be sexier than dicing with death? That’s why George Clooney – a man who looks and sounds like mocha tastes – currently advertises upmarket coffee capsule systems. The closest thing tea drinkers have ever had to a pin-up is a dumpy cartoon foreman with a flat cap and the voice of Brian Glover, or those PG Tips chimps which appeared in the 1950s.

Since the frothy rise of coffee culture in the 1990s – beamed into our homes by Friends, then materialising on our high streets as Starbucks – tea has often seemed like a second-class beverage. Even important scientific advances like the pyramid tea bag (developed by Brooke Bond at a reputed cost of £16 million, in response to Tetley’s revolutionary, sales-boosting “round tea bag” in 1989) couldn’t compete with the whooshing, Ivor The Engine-esque exertions of the espresso machine.

Recently, though, as unexpectedly hard-up citizens start scrutinising their insulated cups of milky coffee, tea appears to making a comeback, brimming with confidence and riding the wave of its supposed health-giving properties – drinking three or more cups a day was found by British researchers to protect against heart attacks and some cancers in 1996.

My pot-half-full outlook might be coloured by the fact that I recently defected to tea after 15 years of concentrated coffee abuse. There was a time I would have injected espresso directly into my eyeballs if I thought it would deliver a more intense hit. (I still haven’t completely escaped the bean’s diabolical grip – for me, tiramisu is like methadone.) Normal people can happily toggle between the two beverages, but I’ve been radicalised, and now only identify with such thinkers and visionaries as George Orwell, Tony Benn and The Mad Hatter. Tea, in all its bounteous forms, is hotter than it has been in years.

My home city of Glasgow is the perfect launchpad for this sweeping tea revival. It’s macerated in tea history: the shrewd marketer Catherine Cranston opened her first tearoom in the city’s Argyle Street in 1878, and went on to build the Miss Cranston’s Tea Room empire through which, among other things, she became a key patron of Charles Rennie Mackintosh and his artist wife Margaret MacDonald. Since then, the market has diversified: Cranston’s elegant Willow Tea Rooms on Sauchiehall Street remain proudly and popularly old-fashioned, while the far more ramshackle Tchai-Ovna House Of Tea in the city’s west end offers shisha pipes along with your oolong. The idiosyncratic Butterfly And Pig basement bar on Glasgow’s Bath Street recently opened an upstairs tea annexe with quaintly mismatched crockery and a selection of cakes so inviting they should be protected by iron bars rather than glass. So, to better understand the phenomenon, I’ve set out to find some of the city’s current crop of tea innovators.

Could a company called Big Man Tea plausibly come from anywhere other than Glasgow? The 10-month-old baby of Natasha Trainor and Niall Campbell, Big Man supplies specialist teas to some of the city’s best restaurants (including the celebrated Café Gandolfi and Japanese noodle bar Ichiban) as well as to spa resorts, corporate clients and private customers online. Over several cups of tea served in the distinctive Big Man glass teaware (all the better to witness the infusion process), Trainor and Campbell patiently talk me through their rainbow coalition of yellow, green, blue and red loose teas, all sourced in small batches from single estates in China, Japan and beyond.

“We did a lot of tasting and research before launching Big Man,” says Trainor. “We must have tasted almost a thousand teas …” The result is essentially a curated collection targeted at tea-drinkers looking for something a little special. A budding tea from China’s Yunnan province is a favourite; tiny bushels of green tea leaves and red jasmine that “flower” when you add the just-boiling water. (That’s why a glass teapot helps.) “Flavour comes first,” says Campbell. “Most tea companies are focused on consistency with their teas but for us it’s more like wine vintages – our teas can be different year to year.”

Trainor and Campbell met at university in St Andrews a decade ago, and remained friends even as they set off separately around the globe. Working in a Hong Kong museum got Trainor hooked on traditional tea ceremonies. For Campbell, a trip to Vancouver’s Chinatown introduced him to Pu Erh, a pungent tea traditionally pressed into cakes and aged like fine malt whisky. Bringing their love of specialist teas home to Scotland seemed like a logical next step, even during a recession.

“There is a real demand for these teas,” says Trainor. “People can be fanatical about tracking them down, so we saw a gap in the market. And we always knew we wanted to be online so that we could spend more time going out and meeting people, getting them to taste our products.”

Repositioning tea as a premium product is a work in process, though. Victoria Beckham’s unsmiling endorsement of Pu Erh as a slimming aid makes Trainor and Campbell roll their eyes, but they are canny enough to know that it all helps raise awareness of rarer teas. (Their own Pu Erh, they inform me, is a reliable seller.)

Big Man Tea comes in silvery space-pouches in eco-friendly drawstring bags with the company’s brightly coloured mascot – a Japanese Daruma good luck charm – glowering like a demented Manga character. It’s a confident product, and confidence is sexy. Be warned, though: it might affect your love life. “I have become so evangelical about tea I can just talk about it all the time,” says Trainor. “I know my fiancé loves me but sometimes his eyes just glaze over …”

Propaganda war

According to the British Coffee Association, 70 million cups of coffee are consumed every day in the UK. That sounds like a lot, but over at the UK Tea Council, they claim a daily tally of 165 million cuppas (their website features a faintly triumphant counter clacking ever upwards). But thanks to the high-vis, high-street dominance of chains such as Costa and Starbucks, coffee is still winning the propaganda war.

Joanne McLeod is one of those fighting against this on the frontline. “I saw this tiny lady in Starbucks and she had this big mug of coffee,” she says. “How she lifted it up to her face without breaking her wrist, I don’t know. I thought ‘that’s not right – that old lady should be having a nice cup of tea’. I just wanted to scoop her up and bring her here.”

The “here” she refers to is McLeod’s city centre teashop Brewhaha, positioned in one of the main entry portals to Glasgow’s Buchanan Galleries. There is none of the starched whiff of Miss Cranston here: the Brewhaha walls are bright, modernist white, with a Lichtenstein-inspired comic strip mural that manages to link striptease and tea. The moulded lampshades are shaped like bowler hats; Belgian surrealist Magritte, you feel, would have approved.

Above a cooler containing freshly-made sandwiches, a headless dummy models a T-shirt that reads “I [HEART] TEA”. As mission statements go, it’s something we can all get behind. McLeod has another mantra – “Tea is tea and should be drunk!” – that she dunks regularly into conversation.

“I’d always liked the idea of having a tearoom, but it had to be at the right time,” she says. McLeod established Brewhaha as a company more than five years ago, supplying a range of teas sourced from Sri Lanka to high-end retailers such as Selfridges and Harrods. The playful company name – the result of a red wine-fuelled brainstorming session with some gal pals – is amplified by cute and colourful retro packaging. This cheekiness shook up the tea retail scene. “Our teas screamed out at the customer from the shelf, they were so colourful,” she says. “People would buy the whole range just to get all the colours. And since then, a lot of other companies have taken up our colour challenge.”

As with Big Man, McLeod acknowledges the power of strong branding but insists “the product has to be good as well”.

The Brewhaha tearoom opened last December, and McLeod is preparing to mark its first year with a special birthday tea variety. “You couldn’t do that with coffee,” she says. “You’d just have to put double cream in or something.” A wide range of brews, from classic greens to fruity libations, are listed in a booklet that functions exactly like a cocktail list, in that the descriptions make you want to try everything, all at once.

With sandwiches and cakes, and even an Illy coffee machine tucked in the corner to cater for weakling bean fiends, Brewhaha appears to be meeting the coffee franchises of the world on their own terms. Look closer, though, and there are key differences. Instead of slouchy leather couches, Brewhaha has retro box-seats: comfy, but definitely upright, with proper tables. “You just can’t serve tea spread out on a couch,” says McLeod. “You need space to do it properly.” The crockery rattles as she arranges it just so on the table. My spoon tinks against my cup. “I love that sound,” she says. “It makes me so happy …”

‘I’m not a tea snob’

With Costa just a scone’s throw away, and the venerable John Lewis café within striking distance, Brewhaha opened on a competitive site. But the business has grown steadily, offering an attractive alternative to overfamiliar chains. Their streamlined afternoon tea options – with substantial sandwiches, cakes and the option to doggy-bag any leftovers – start at a very attractive £7.50. McLeod radiates an almost maternal pride when describing her teashop being overrun with school-uniformed kids, usually the stuff of shopkeeper’s nightmares. “Children don’t get offered tea any more – they get offered soft drinks. I’d love to help change that around.” Even staff from Costa next door have been known to be lured in on their lunchbreak, which (sort of) corroborates my cherished theory that tea-drinkers are back on the march.

“It does seem like everyone wants to talk about tea at the moment,” says McLeod. “Coffee is on the backfoot slightly and I think people are viewing tea differently. But I’m not a tea snob. I’ve met plenty of those in my time. Tea is tea and should be drunk.” She smiles. “There are some people who’ll talk about tea until it gets cold …”

On the last Sunday afternoon of every month, the venerable Argyll Hotel on Glasgow’s Sauchiehall Street is hijacked by Granny Would Be Proud, an informal market for purveyors of vintage clothing, old-fashioned jewellery and retro sweets. Organised by the fantastically named Frederique Villain and friends, Granny Would Be Proud recently expanded to two floors, to create space for an old-fashioned tearoom. If Big Man and Brewhaha are boutique businesses, this is more like spontaneous grassroots activism.

“I’m originally from France, so I’m really more of a coffee person,” says Villain. “But a tearoom seemed perfect for what we’re doing. If you look at the clothes and things people are buying, they are quite similar to what our grannies would have had. So it makes sense to add tea to that.” Although the tearoom is ad-hoc, it comes together beautifully. One of the regular stallholders deals in vintage crockery, so if you fall in love with your dainty bone china cup you can buy it. There are beautiful old tablecloths and characterful tea cosies. And for £3, you can enjoy a pot of tea and as many homemade buns as you can manage.

The tea looks and tastes familiar – Villain has stocked up on Brewhaha. “I loved the packaging so when I saw it in Peckham’s, I just bought it.” Her tearoom is doing a roaring trade, with school-age bohemians, twentysomething hipsters and even immaculately turned-out grannies mingling over their brews.

While it may never wrestle the high street back from the bean counters of Starbucks, or challenge coffee’s inherent sexiness, tea’s sweeping, romantic hinterland – filled with pungent vocabulary such as “lapsang souchong” and “kahwah” – suggests multitudes that would take a lifetime to explore. If coffee was a one-night stand, tea increasingly feels like the real thing.

For more information about Big Man Tea and Brewhaha visit www.bigmantea.com or www.brewhahatea.co.uk. For details of the next Granny Would Be Proud event, search for “Granny Proud” on Facebook.