Tea drinks
Prepared drinks rather than leaves: what goes in, in what order, and with what. Where a drink is made differently from one town to the next, the page says so rather than picking a version and calling it correct.
Milk-based
7Built on milk, evaporated milk or condensed milk as much as on the tea, which is usually brewed far stronger to stand up to it.
Sweetened milk tea served cold over chewy tapioca pearls, drunk through a wide straw. Developed in Taiwan in the 1980s and now one of the most commercially successful drinks in the world, it is the reason a large share of younger drinkers encounter tea at all.
A café drink built from spiced concentrate or syrup topped with steamed milk. It is a distinct preparation from masala chai rather than a version of it: the spices are usually pre-extracted into a syrup, and the tea is often a minor component or absent entirely.
Strong black tea repeatedly strained through a fine cloth bag and served with evaporated milk. The bag stains tea-brown with use and gave the drink its Cantonese nickname; the repeated straining is what produces its characteristic smoothness.
Strong Earl Grey with steamed milk and vanilla syrup. Despite the name it is generally credited to Vancouver rather than London, and it is a café invention of the late twentieth century rather than a British tradition.
Kashmiri salted milk tea with a distinctive pink colour, produced by boiling green tea with bicarbonate of soda and then shocking it with cold water before the milk goes in. The colour is a genuine chemical effect rather than an added dye.
Strong black tea with condensed milk, repeatedly poured between two vessels held far apart. The pulling aerates the drink, cools it to drinking temperature and raises a thick foam on top, and it is performed as a piece of skill in its own right.
Hong Kong milk tea combined with brewed coffee, in roughly a three-to-seven ratio. Named after mandarin ducks, which are conventionally depicted as a pair, the drink is a Hong Kong invention and is drunk in enormous quantity there.
Spiced
1Simmered with spices, where the spice is not an accent but half of what is being made.
Black tea simmered with milk, sugar and whole spices. A household drink across South Asia with enormous regional and family variation, and no single authoritative recipe.
Iced
2Served cold, which mutes aroma and sweetness and so changes what is brewed as well as how it is served.
Strong black tea sweetened heavily while still hot, then chilled and served over ice. A staple of the American South, where the sugar is dissolved into hot tea rather than stirred into cold — which is the technical difference between it and iced tea with sugar added.
Heavily sweetened spiced black tea served over ice with condensed and evaporated milk poured on top. Its distinctive orange colour comes from added colouring in the commercial tea mix rather than from the tea itself, which is worth knowing because it is widely assumed otherwise.
Whisked
1Powdered leaf suspended in liquid rather than steeped and strained out.
Whisked matcha combined with steamed or cold milk. A modern café preparation rather than a traditional one, and the drink through which most people outside Japan first meet matcha — usually sweetened, and often made with a grade that would be harsh drunk plain.
Other preparations
4Drinks that belong to a place rather than to a category: a national way of taking tea rather than a style of drink.
Chinese gunpowder green tea brewed strong with a large bundle of fresh spearmint and a great deal of sugar, poured from height into small glasses. It is both a daily drink and a formal act of hospitality across North Africa, and the pour is functional as well as expressive.
Compressed dark tea boiled hard and churned with butter and salt into a thick, savoury drink. It is a staple across the Tibetan plateau and the Himalaya, drunk in large quantities daily, and it is a soup-like preparation rather than anything a Western drinker would recognise as tea.
Black tea brewed in a stacked double kettle — a çaydanlık — where concentrate is made in the upper pot and diluted to taste with water from the lower. Served in small tulip-shaped glasses, it is drunk in very large quantities throughout the day in Turkey.
A strong tea concentrate kept in a small pot on top of a samovar and diluted in the cup with hot water from below. The system solves the same problem as Turkish çay by the same logic, and the two traditions are closely related historically.
Preparation times are the whole preparation
The minutes on each card cover everything the steps describe, not the steep alone. Po cha and noon chai are long because the simmering is long; a matcha latte is short because there is nothing to wait for. Where a drink is traditionally made in quantity for a household rather than a cup, the serving count says so.
What these pages describe
How a drink is made and where it is made that way. Nothing here says what a drink does to a person, and no version is presented as the authoritative one — the regional variation is written into each page precisely because there usually is no single correct recipe.
The teas these drinks are built on · the brewing methods they use