Turkish tea, explained: how çay is brewed and served

Turkish tea, çay, is a strong black tea grown on the eastern Black Sea coast around Rize and brewed in a two-tier pot called a çaydanlık: the lower pot boils water, the upper pot steeps a dark concentrate for ten minutes or more, and each small tulip glass gets a little concentrate topped up with hot water to the strength the drinker asks for. It is taken without milk, usually with sugar, and all day long; Turkey drinks more tea per person than any other country, around 3 kg a year each by the most recent counts. In our catalog, Turkish Black brews at 212°F (100°C) for 10 minutes with 4 g per cup and sits at level 3 on our 0–3 caffeine scale.

Where çay comes from

Almost all Turkish tea grows in a narrow, rainy strip along the eastern Black Sea, with Rize province at the center and the neighboring provinces of Artvin and Trabzon adding to the harvest. The crop is young by tea standards. The republic pushed cultivation around Rize in the 1920s and 1930s with seed brought from neighboring Georgia, whose own Georgian black is a lighter, maltier cousin that brews for 3½ minutes, and Turkey's first modern tea factory opened in Rize in 1947. Nearly everything the region produces is drunk at home rather than exported, which is why çay is everywhere in Turkey and rare on shelves anywhere else. The leaf is fully oxidized and sold mostly as fine broken grades, built for a dark, brisk glass rather than a delicate cup. Our Turkey origin page puts it next to the other tea countries in the catalog.

The çaydanlık: why the tea is brewed as a concentrate

A çaydanlık is two kettles stacked: a bigger one below for water and a smaller one on top, the demlik, for the leaf. You boil the lower pot, pour a little of that water over the dry leaf in the upper pot, set it back on top and let it steep over low heat while the water underneath keeps simmering. Ten to fifteen minutes later the upper pot holds a concentrate the color Turks call tavşan kanı, rabbit's blood: deep, clear and red-brown, and the first thing a host looks at. Nobody drinks that straight. Every glass starts as a concentrate and ends as a choice: a finger or two of tea from the top pot, then hot water from the bottom pot, and the host asks whether you want it açık, light, or demli, strong. The same pot serves a dozen guests at a dozen strengths, which is the whole point of the design, and it stays on the stove while the conversation runs.

The glass, the sugar and the saucer

Çay is served in a small, slim-waisted glass called ince belli, the tulip glass, which Turkish glassworks have mass-produced since 1935 and which is now as much a symbol of the country as the tea itself. The narrow waist is where you hold it while the tea is scalding, and the clear glass shows the color, which matters when color is how the brew is judged. The glass sits on a small saucer with a tiny spoon and a sugar cube or two; milk is not part of it. Sugar goes into the glass in most of the country, but in Erzurum, in the east, the custom is kıtlama: a hard lump of sugar held in the mouth while the tea is sipped past it, so one lump lasts several glasses, and the city registered its kıtlama sugar as a protected regional product in 2022. Lemon is common there too, and in many homes a slice of lemon is the only thing added. The apple tea sold to visitors in the bazaars, elma çayı, is usually a sweet instant drink with no tea leaf in it; what Turks actually drink is the black tea.

How to brew Turkish tea at home

Our catalog figures, 212°F (100°C), 10 minutes and 4 g per cup, describe the concentrate, not a single mug, so read them as a method. Count 4 g of leaf for every glass you plan to pour, so 16 g for four, and put it in the dry upper pot. Boil the lower pot, pour a little boiling water over the leaf, stack the pots and keep the heat low for 10 to 15 minutes. Then fill each glass a third to a half with concentrate and top it up with hot water from the lower pot; taste, and adjust the next glass rather than the pot. Without a çaydanlık, a small teapot sitting on top of a saucepan of simmering water does the same job, and so does a teapot kept warm on the lowest flame with a heat diffuser underneath. For comparison, English Breakfast steeps 4 minutes at 208°F (98°C) with 2.5 g straight in the cup; Turkish tea steeps more than twice as long at a higher ratio because it is going to be diluted. Steep 4 g of Rize tea for 10 minutes and drink it undiluted and it will be harsh: the dilution is part of the recipe, not an afterthought. Our brewing chart has the single-cup figures for every other black tea on one page, and our çaydanlık recipe walks through the pot step by step.

What it tastes like and when to drink it

Our catalog records Turkish Black as robust, intense, full-bodied and slightly bitter, and lists it for the morning, mid-morning and mid-afternoon. At level 3 on our caffeine ladder it sits with Assam and the breakfast blends, so a demli glass is a morning drink, while an açık one, mostly hot water, is how a Turk gets through the fifth glass of the afternoon. It is built for the table: the Turkish breakfast of white cheese, olives, tomatoes and a sesame simit is poured with glass after glass of it, and the very sweet syrup pastries that close a meal are served with çay precisely because its bitterness balances them. Our pairing page for Turkish Black goes dish by dish. In summer the same strong brew works cold: our iced Turkish tea with lemon and mint brews it double strength and chills it over ice. Mint is our addition, not a Turkish habit; if you want a mint tea proper, that is Morocco's té moruno, a green tea with fresh mint, not a black.