London Fog Origin: The Vancouver Story Behind the Drink
The name sounds British. The tea base - Earl Grey - is named after a British Prime Minister. The whole aesthetic of the drink suggests grey skies, Victorian terraces, and a cup of something warming on a rainy London afternoon. None of that is relevant to where the London Fog actually came from.
It came from Vancouver. Specifically, from a small café on 4th Avenue in the mid-1990s, and specifically from a pregnant woman who couldn't drink coffee and was improvising.
The Buckwheat Café, 4th Avenue, Vancouver
The Buckwheat Café was the kind of neighbourhood place that becomes a fixture in people's routines. Small, run by a man named Rene, known for its coffee and especially its baking - good enough that the café supplied Starbucks with scones and fudge bars at the time. For Mary Loria and her husband, it was the local café they'd stop into while walking the dog or heading to work. An ordinary part of an ordinary day.
Loria was working at a paint-your-own-ceramics shop nearby when she became pregnant with her first daughter, Molly. Severe morning sickness changed her relationship with food and drink considerably, coffee included. The smell alone was enough. But a hot drink still appealed to her, and the ritual of stopping at Buckwheat didn't stop either.
What she came up with instead was not a recipe so much as a problem-solving exercise. She was a tea drinker alongside being a coffee drinker, so the idea of Earl Grey as a base wasn't a stretch. The leap was asking for something a regular café wouldn't typically make: Earl Grey tea brewed with hot steamed skim milk instead of water, the way an espresso latte uses milk as the liquid rather than an addition to it.
The barista, by Loria's own account, was skeptical. She made it anyway. It worked.
After receiving her cup, Loria walked over to the café's condiment station and added vanilla sugar - a small flavour instinct that turned out to be the third and finishing element of the drink. The bergamot in the Earl Grey, the steamed milk, the vanilla. Together, they produced something that felt both familiar and new: warm and creamy like a latte, aromatic and floral from the tea, gently sweet from the vanilla.
She kept ordering it. She recommended it to others. She ordered it at other cafés around Vancouver. People liked it, ordered it themselves, and told others. The drink spread through the city's café scene entirely by word of mouth, without a name, without a recipe written down anywhere, simply carried by the people who'd had one and wanted another.
The Name Nobody Can Trace
At some point, the drink acquired the name "London Fog." Nobody knows exactly when, or who coined it.
Loria has said clearly that she didn't name it. By the time "London Fog" started appearing on café menus across Vancouver, she didn't even connect it to what she'd been ordering for years. It took a moment of recognition - seeing the menu description - before she realised that the drink that had spread across the city was the one she'd cobbled together at a condiment station at the Buckwheat.
The most likely theory is that the name describes the appearance of the drink: hot milk steamed into tea produces a hazy, cloud-like effect in the cup, a visual that suggests fog. Paired with the British associations of Earl Grey - named after Charles Grey, the 2nd Earl Grey and British Prime Minister in the 1830s - "London Fog" was a natural fit for café menus looking to signal something elevated and old-world. The name evokes British sophistication without any actual connection to Britain. It's branding by atmosphere.
The result is one of those food naming accidents where the label almost works too well: evocative, slightly mysterious, and completely misleading about where the thing came from.
How It Spread East - and Then Everywhere
For most of the 1990s, the London Fog was a local Vancouver phenomenon, passed around by word of mouth among the cafés and regulars of the city's west side. What moved it beyond that was a combination of personal connection and timing.
Loria's family was in Calgary. She visited regularly, she ordered London Fogs, and the drink followed her - or followed the people she told about it. By the early 2000s, Calgary's café scene was ordering them. And from Calgary, the drink entered the orbit of the major chains: Starbucks and Second Cup began offering it, which gave the London Fog national distribution and mass visibility almost overnight.
What had started as one woman's pregnancy improvisation at a neighbourhood café on 4th Avenue was now on menus coast to coast. The drink had travelled from a Vancouver condiment station to a Starbucks menu board in under a decade.
From there, the global spread was simply a function of how chain coffee culture works. The London Fog is now ordered in cafés across North America, the UK, Europe, and beyond. Earl Grey is already internationally familiar, vanilla and milk are universally loved, and the combination turns out to be one of those rare recipes where three simple things produce something considerably more than the sum of their parts.
The Scotland Detail Worth Knowing
Of all the small ironies in the London Fog's history, this one is the most satisfying. In Scotland, the drink is sometimes called a "Vancouver Fog." Whether that's universal Scottish café practice or a charming piece of regional custom, the logic holds: the drink came from Vancouver, not London, and at least some people on the other side of the Atlantic knew it.
England, for its part, has largely adopted the drink under the original name without much awareness of where it came from. The Scots seem to have done their research.
The Competing Claims
As with most origin stories that became famous after the fact, the London Fog attracted competing claims. Island Coffeehouse in Langley, Washington, has said they were serving a similar tea latte earlier than the Buckwheat Café - though their version used peppermint tea rather than Earl Grey, which is a different drink in any meaningful sense. Various other Vancouver establishments have suggested connections, and the general murkiness of informal food history means certainty is impossible.
The Mary Loria/Buckwheat Café account remains the most widely cited and the most detailed - it has the specificity of a real story rather than a claim. Loria has spoken about it, described the circumstances, and named the barista, the café, the owner. The story has the texture of something that actually happened in a particular place at a particular time, rather than something reconstructed afterward.
It also has a quality that makes it plausible in the way that accidental food inventions typically are: it wasn't a flash of inspiration or a deliberate recipe development. It was a pregnant woman with morning sickness trying to get through a café visit, solving a problem in the most direct way available to her.
What Made the Drink Work
The London Fog succeeded because the flavour logic behind it is genuinely sound. Earl Grey's bergamot - a fragrant citrus oil from a fruit native to southern Italy - has a floral, slightly bitter brightness that cuts through richness beautifully. Steamed milk softens the tea's tannins and adds body. Vanilla rounds both of them out, filling in the sweetness that the bergamot's citrus edge needs as a counterpoint.
The three elements balance in a way that feels inevitable once you've had the drink - which is probably why it spread as fast as it did. When someone orders a drink, enjoys it, and immediately wants to tell a friend about it, the drink has already done the work of its own marketing. The London Fog didn't need a brand or a launch. It just needed to be good.
For a deeper look at bergamot itself - what it is, where it comes from, and what it contributes to the cup - the bergamot and Earl Grey guide covers the ingredient in full.
A BC Brand and a BC Drink
Old Growth Beverages is based in Nanoose Bay, BC - which means making a quality London Fog isn't just a product decision, it's a natural fit. The drink was invented in this province, spread through this province's café culture, and carries the Pacific Northwest's particular talent for finding comfort in a warm cup on a grey-sky morning.
The OGB London Fog microground tea powder combines organic Earl Grey, organic bergamot, and organic vanilla in a format that dissolves directly into hot water or milk - no steeping, no straining, no café lineup required. It's the same three-ingredient logic Mary Loria arrived at by instinct at a condiment station in 1997, made consistent and immediate. The full guide to what's in a London Fog covers the flavour profile, the caffeine, and the best ways to make it at home.
If you want the iced version - equally good, especially when the Pacific Northwest briefly stops being grey - the iced London Fog recipe is the place to start.
Frequently Asked Questions About the London Fog
Was the London Fog really invented in Vancouver?
The most widely accepted account places its origin at the Buckwheat Café on 4th Avenue in Vancouver in the mid-1990s. A pregnant regular named Mary Loria asked for Earl Grey tea made with hot steamed milk instead of water, then added vanilla sugar at the condiment station. The drink spread through Vancouver by word of mouth before gaining national reach in the early 2000s through Calgary and the major coffee chains. Competing origin claims exist, but the Buckwheat Café account has the most detail and is the most commonly cited.
Why is it called the London Fog if it's Canadian?
Nobody knows who named it, including the woman who invented it. Mary Loria has said she didn't come up with the name - it appeared on café menus across Vancouver without her input. The most plausible explanation is that the name describes the appearance of the drink (steamed milk creating a hazy, fog-like effect in the cup) while leaning on Earl Grey's British associations for a sense of old-world elegance. The name stuck, the British connection is incidental, and the drink is entirely Canadian in origin.
What is a "Vancouver Fog"?
Some cafés in Scotland call the London Fog a "Vancouver Fog," correctly attributing it to its actual city of origin rather than its nominal one. This appears to be more of a regional custom than a universal Scottish convention, but the logic is sound: the drink came from Vancouver, and whoever named it "London Fog" was doing atmospheric branding rather than food history.
What are the original London Fog ingredients?
The original at the Buckwheat Café was Earl Grey tea brewed with hot steamed skim milk, with vanilla sugar added from the café's condiment station. Today's version uses the same three elements in a slightly more refined form: Earl Grey tea, steamed milk (dairy or plant-based), and vanilla syrup or extract. The bergamot in the Earl Grey is the ingredient that makes the flavour distinct - floral, citrusy, and immediately recognisable.
Is the London Fog a tea or a coffee drink?
It's a tea drink. The base is Earl Grey, a black tea - no coffee involved. The preparation style borrows from espresso latte culture (steamed milk, foam, a café presentation) which is why it sits naturally on coffee shop menus, but the caffeine comes entirely from the tea. A typical London Fog has roughly 30 to 60 milligrams of caffeine per cup, considerably less than a shot of espresso.
Can I make a London Fog at home?
Easily. The traditional method is to brew Earl Grey strong, steam milk separately, and combine them with vanilla syrup. With OGB's London Fog microground tea powder, you skip the steeping and straining entirely - dissolve a tablespoon in hot water or milk, adjust to taste, done in under two minutes. The same drink, with less infrastructure.