The glass, and why it is that shape
A description of something people do now, compiled from published accounts rather than from practice.
The istikan is a small clear glass, waisted in the middle so that it narrows at the belly and flares again at the rim, holding not very much — a few mouthfuls — and served on its own small saucer, often with a spoon. Clear glass is the point: the colour of the liquor is part of what is being served, and Iraqi tea is drunk very dark, so a cup that hid it would be missing half the transaction. The waist gives a place to hold a glass that is too hot to hold anywhere else, which is the practical function, and the small volume means the tea is drunk while it is still hot rather than cooling in the hand. Sugar goes in generously and is often left to sit at the bottom, so the last mouthful is sweeter than the first, which some drinkers regard as the best part and others stir out. The same shape, more or less, is the Turkish tea glass and a cousin of the Iranian one, and the family resemblance across a wide region is a better guide to how the practice travelled than any national account of it.
Two kettles stacked: concentrate below, water above
A description of something people do now, compiled from published accounts rather than from practice.
The domestic method most commonly described is a stacked pair of vessels — a large kettle of water below on the heat, and a smaller pot sitting on top of it holding leaf and a small amount of water, kept hot by the steam rather than by direct flame. The upper pot makes a very strong concentrate that sits and darkens; the lower one supplies boiling water to cut it to strength in the glass. That arrangement solves a specific problem well: tea can be served immediately, at whatever strength the drinker wants, to anyone who arrives, for hours, without brewing a fresh pot each time and without the concentrate stewing over direct heat. It is the same logic as the Iranian samovar and the Turkish çaydanlık, reached independently or borrowed — TeaHQ does not know which and is not going to guess — and it is the reason tea in this whole region is an instant offer rather than something that takes ten minutes. The leaf is generally a strong black tea, much of it imported from Sri Lanka and India, and cardamom is a common addition, sometimes with a black lime or a little dried lime peel in the pot.
The chai khana as a public room
A description of something people do now, compiled from published accounts rather than from practice.
The Iraqi tea house — chai khana, sometimes rendered as a qahwa even where coffee is not the point — is a men's public room of a kind that recurs across the region and that this catalogue documents elsewhere in Central Asian, Turkish and Chinese forms. Benches or plain chairs, a counter with the kettles, dominoes and backgammon, newspapers, a television, smoke, and customers who stay a long time for a very small spend. Some houses in Baghdad have a literary and political association and are named in accounts of the city's intellectual life; the great majority are ordinary neighbourhood rooms with no such reputation, and an outside account that describes only the famous ones gives a false impression of the institution. TeaHQ notes the gendered character of these spaces plainly rather than passing over it: the traditional chai khana is largely a male space, home service is where women's tea practice mostly sits, and both statements are generalisations that particular places and particular decades will contradict.
A very large tea habit with no tea plants
TeaHQ's own reading of well-attested general knowledge, with no single source behind it.
Iraq grows no tea and drinks a great deal of it, which puts it in the same structural position as Egypt, Morocco and the Gulf states: a consumption culture entirely dependent on imports, with a strong national style that is nonetheless built out of somebody else's crop. TeaHQ makes the observation because the catalogue's centre of gravity is producing countries, and a reader who follows only the origin pages would conclude that tea culture and tea growing are found in the same places. They frequently are not. The most distinctive preparation methods in the world — the Maghrebi pour, the Iraqi two-kettle stack, the Egyptian saidi boil — belong overwhelmingly to places that buy every leaf they use, and the reason is not mysterious: a culture that has to buy its tea makes decisions about how to stretch it, sweeten it and serve it that a culture with a hillside behind the house never has to make.