Tea and Coffee (logistics)

Alright, so you've got your setting all mapped out and you're tired of your heroes spending time at the pub (you filthy commies).  What is an author to do?  Plain old water is boring and often polluted.  There ain't no sports drinks here (I'm not too worried about copyrights since I don't make money off of this, but I get the feeling these folks might come after me.  These guys and that cheese-eater fronted entertainment group).  We need some kind of beverage to consume on the regular to get you through the day.  Carbonated beverages seem to be out the window.  What does that leave?  For most of us, those beverages are tea and coffee.
    It seems that the history of tea began thousands of years ago in ancient China or India, but our worlds are made up, so don't worry about who found it first.  The tea plant that we know and love (producing: black tea, green tea, white tea, oolong tea, etc) grows best in climates that maintain steady temperatures year round, but enjoy opposing rainy and dry seasons.  Altitude doesn't seem to matter much, but will slow the maturation and growth cycles.  Soil is preferably deep and well drained.  Tea is harvested every week or two during the growing season.  Wild, the bushes can grow quite large, but under cultivation they are usually planted in rows and trained into a fan shape approximately four feet wide to increase the harvesting surface (you only take the leaves at the end of the sprig).  This caffeinated concoction has become popular the world over, but production is obviously not so simple.  Of course, if you want to make it work differently in your world, I won't stop you.
    Obviously, not all tea is made from the tea plant.  Herbal teas (aka tisane, according to wikipedia)
include basically any other plant matter steeped in hot water.  Often these are herbal remedies and seem to fit more snugly in your woods-witch handbook.  These would include beverages like the ginger tea my Czech friends swear by to fix up their colds or the chamomile tea you drink at night as a soother.  Raistlin Majere (Dragonlance series) had his mixture to help with the cough.  Many herbs that we know and love have been used for medicinal purposes throughout history and were staples of the medieval garden.  Indeed, at the time, herbal cures were probably the most efficacious thing out there.  Especially for those who lived near nature, a little herb lore is almost a certainty (and don't forget your poisons, you need to know what to avoid eating in the woods too).  Who doesn't like a little soother at the end of a long day, or a warm-up when you've just come in from slaying that mean old ice dragon?

    Coffee is a much different beast than its caffeinated cousin.  The two main varieties are robusta and arabica (Vlad Taltos drinks something similar in Mr. Brust's entertaining series).  Arabica beans grow best in subtropical regions at 1800-3600 feet, or equatorial regions at 3600-6300 feet.  Robusta coffee grows within 10 degrees of the equator between sea level and about 3000 feet.  Coffee can be grown in conjunction with other crops as it is a shade loving plant which can reach 15 feet in height if left unpruned.  Fruiting occurs once a year, producing bunches of coffee cherries, which ripen over the course of 5-6 months (faster ripening and higher yield if solo cropped, though much harder on the soil and environment).  These fruits have a sweet-tart taste to them.  The seeds of these cherries are the coffee beans.  The legend is that an Ethiopian goatherd spotted his amped charges eating these berries and passed the knowledge along.  The beverage may not have been developed in your world, but someone could know about the berries (or coca leaves for that matter, but that's a different post).
    There are plenty of alternative beverages to explore if you don't want your creations sounding like alcoholics to certain audiences (look, man, it's only a problem if it gets in the way of your life).  Humans have been experimenting with the world around us since we figured out we need to eat to survive.  Brewed beverages of all sorts have made their way into our culture because of their health effects and because they taste much better than plain old boiled water.  While herbal concoctions may have been the most common of these examples found in medieval Europe, there is no reason your world can't incorporate more.  I don't know where your characters live or what kind of plants grow there, but everybody need a little pick-me-up now and again.  Cheers.


http://www.kew.org/plant-cultures/plants/tea_grow_it.html
http://www.tea.co.uk/tea-growing-and-production
http://botanical.com/
http://www.ncausa.org/i4a/pages/index.cfm?pageid=68
http://www.ico.org/planting_e.asp?section=About_Coffee
http://www.thanksgivingcoffee.com/blog/?p=174