What is in the glass
A description of something people do now, compiled from published accounts rather than from practice.
Strong black tea, brewed hard and held, sweetened heavily with sugar and with sweetened condensed milk, then poured over a tall glass packed with ice and finished with a float of evaporated milk or condensed milk on top, so the drink arrives layered before it is stirred. Cha dam yen is the same tea iced without milk; cha nom yen is with milk; cha ron is hot, and is drunk far less. The characteristic orange colour is not what tea does. It comes from a colouring added to the tea blends made for this purpose, alongside flavourings that are variously described as vanilla, star anise, tamarind or spice depending on the blend. This is a manufactured product formulated for a specific drink, sold in large bags to stalls, and the drink and the blend developed together. TeaHQ states it plainly because a good deal of writing implies that the colour is a natural property of Thai tea, which it is not.
The sock
A description of something people do now, compiled from published accounts rather than from practice.
The filter is a long cloth bag on a metal ring with a handle — the same tool used in Hong Kong cha chaan teng and at Malaysian mamak stalls — into which the leaf goes and through which the tea is repeatedly poured and strained. It stains dark, is used through a shift or longer, and is rinsed rather than scrubbed; vendors regard a well-used sock as part of the setup. The repeated pouring through a fine cloth is what gives the tea its body and what makes a coarse leaf usable. Three unrelated street-tea cultures in South-East and East Asia arrived at the same device for the same reason: a cheap fine-grade tea, brewed strong, needs a filter that will not clog and a method that will extract hard. The cloth sock is the answer in Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur and Hong Kong alike, and it is one of the few genuinely convergent pieces of equipment in this catalogue.
The cart
A description of something people do now, compiled from published accounts rather than from practice.
Cha yen is sold from carts, motorcycle sidecars, market stalls, shopfronts and chain outlets, poured into a plastic bag with ice and a straw and tied with a rubber band, or into a tall plastic cup. It is a hot-country street drink and the whole apparatus is built for speed: the tea is made in bulk in advance, the milk is at hand, and a serving takes seconds. Prices are low. It is drunk through the day and is not attached to a meal or an occasion. The bagged serving deserves a note because it surprises visitors: a drink in a knotted plastic bag with a straw through it is a standard street format across much of South-East Asia, is easier to carry on a motorbike than a cup, and is the reason so many Thai street drinks look the way they do in photographs. It is packaging, and like the kulhar it tells you what the trade needed rather than what anybody preferred.
The tea Thailand grows, and where it is
TeaHQ's own reading of well-attested general knowledge, with no single source behind it.
Northern Thailand — Chiang Rai, Chiang Mai, Mae Hong Son — grows a real quantity of tea, including assamica material from the old miang forest gardens and, since the second half of the twentieth century, Taiwanese-style oolongs planted by growers with Taiwanese connections on high ground. There are also green and black teas made for domestic and export markets. Almost none of this is what goes into cha yen, which uses cheap dust and fannings, sometimes imported. The country therefore has two tea industries facing in opposite directions: a highland speciality sector selling oolong at speciality prices, and a bulk supply for the street trade. Neither knows much about the other. That split is the same one recorded in Sri Lanka, Kenya, Assam and Vietnam, and Thailand shows it particularly clearly because the two products do not even resemble each other in the glass.