Po cha (Tibetan butter tea)
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.
Also called butter tea, su you cha.
What it tastes like
Savoury, salty and rich rather than sweet, with a texture closer to a thin broth than to tea. The coarse brick tea’s roughness is exactly what stands up to fat and salt.
What it is built on
Teas
- Kang Zhuan — Coarse and astringent as a plain infusion, and quite different as intended — boiled and churned with butter and salt, where its roughness is exactly what stands up to fat and salt. A tea that only makes sense inside its own preparation.
Brewing method: Boiling and decoction — Leaf, and usually other ingredients, simmered in water or milk rather than steeped — the basis of masala chai, butter tea and noon chai.
Ingredients
- 20 g Compressed dark tea brick
- 1 litre Water
- 50 g Butter, traditionally from yak milk
- 5 g Salt
Preparation
- Step 1. Break tea from the brick and boil it hard for a long period. (30 minutes)
- Step 2. Strain the liquor.
- Step 3. Churn with butter and salt until fully emulsified — traditionally in a tall wooden cylinder.
- Step 4. Serve hot, and refill a guest’s bowl continuously.
Serves 6. About 45 minutes from start to finish, including anything that has to simmer or cool.
There is no single correct version
Central to Tibetan, Bhutanese, Nepali and Ladakhi food culture, with its own hospitality conventions — a guest’s bowl is customarily topped up rather than emptied. TeaHQ describes the practice from the outside.
The steps above are one workable account of how this is made, not the authoritative recipe. Households and regions differ on proportions, on order and sometimes on what counts as the drink at all.
Common mistakes
- Judging it by steeped-tea standards, which misses what it is for
- Using a delicate tea, which cannot survive the boiling
Sources
This page is TeaHQ synthesis. The proportions and the sequence are written from common practice as TeaHQ understands it, with no external source behind them, which is one more reason to read the note on regional variation as the more reliable part of the page.
This page describes how the drink is made and where it is made that way. It says nothing about what drinking it does to a person, and the quantities of milk, sugar or spice are recorded because they are part of the recipe rather than as any kind of recommendation.
Written comparisons
Where TeaHQ has set this drink against something it is routinely confused with, and argued the differences out in full.
- Po cha vs noon chai — Two salted teas from the Himalayan region, both a long way from what most drinkers expect tea to be. Po cha churns brick tea with butter and salt into an emulsion; noon chai boils green tea with bicarbonate of soda until it turns pink, then finishes it with milk and salt.