Posts Tagged ‘Turkish tea’
November 30, 2011 | 
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Turkish Apple Fruit Tea
If you’ve been to Turkey lately, chances are that you’ve come across apple tea. There are two types of apple tea popular in Turkey: apple flavored camelia sinensis, which is apple flavored black tea, and apple fruit tea, which is an apple flavored caffeine free beverage with flowers, leaves, and apple pieces.
Dogadan, the brand of Turkish apple fruit tea that I sell at my tea store, contains the folloring ingredients: Apple, Hibiscus, Blackberry leaves, Apple flavor, Lemon peel, and Cinnamon. The winey color and tartness of the hibiscus makes it the kind of fruit tea that’s very popular in Germany, and my theory is that Turkish guest workers in Germany popularized this tea in their homeland.
When it comes to black tea, I do believe that this year marks the 10th anniversary of the Turks surpassing the Brits in per capita tea consumption, and apple flavored black tea is part of the celebration. Naturally, it’s served Turkish style: sweetened but never with the addition of milk.
Roland at Tea & Treasure
Posted in Herbal Tea, Turkish Tea, Uncategorized | 
Tags: apple tea, fruit tea, Turkish apple tea, Turkish tea | 
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Turkish Stovetop Samovar
While you’re unlikely to have an elaborate charcoal powered samovar at home, you could easily have an inexpensive stovetop model, and even if this is out of reach you could build your own by finding a teapot that fits with some stability on top of a kettle. “To what purpose?” you may ask. Ah, so that you can brew tea the way they do in Turkey, among other places. The advantages of the samovar are flavor, you can serve a lot of tea at once fairly quickly, and the fact that you can serve tea either dark or light.
Here’s how you do it. Fill the kettle with water and bring to a boil, then place some tea into the teapot and fill with hot water from the kettle. Refill the kettle. Now take off the kettle’s lid and place the teapot on the kettle so that the teapot now acts like the lid. Place the kettle back on the stove. When ready to serve, fire up the stove to heat the water in the kettle. This will also heat the now concentrated tea in the teapot. To serve, separate the teapot and kettle, pour some tea into tea glasses, and top with hot water from the kettle. Adjusting the ratio of tea to water makes it darker or lighter to suit the preference of each individual being served. Offer sugar cubes so that everyone can sweeten their tea to taste.
While the samovar method works well with Turkish tea, Russian tea, and with Earl Grey (the Iranian preference, I believe), it may not do as well with strong black teas that tend toward bitterness and astringency; these are better served with milk or cream as in England (but never in Turkey).
Most of the light but tasty tea grown in Turkey is consumed in Turkey, but I do make it a point to always have some on hand at my tea store, as well as a stovetop samovar or two.
Roland at Tea & Treasure
Posted in Earl Grey, Tea Accessories, Turkish Tea, Uncategorized | Tags: Russian tea, samovar, Stovetop Samovar, tea in Turkey, Turkish tea | No Comments »
Rize is a small Turkish province on the Black Sea, with a capital city of the same name. It is very important as the center of the Turkish tea industry.
The city of Rize is built on a narrow area of flat land on the Black Sea coast guarded by steep hillsides. The mild climate is nevertheless extremely wet, so the area is defined by very green vegetation that attracts visitors. Green tea bushes cover entire mountainsides. A panoramic view of the area can be had from Ziraat Park, which is in the city.
You can taste tea blends at the summer Tea Festival in June, where you can also sample rare Anzer honey from the surrounding mountains. The first tea factory was openend in Rize in 1947.
Today I have unveiled Turkish tea for the first time at my teashop.
Roland Petrov
I was on a ferry crossing the Bosphorus when I was offered a small cup of Turkish coffee and charged an exorbitant price for it. I looked around me and saw that the other passengers were drinking tea. I made the assumption, correctly as it turned out, that while tourists were being suckered into overpriced coffee, tea was the drink of choice for Turks themselves.
In 2004, in fact, Turkey had the highest per capita tea consumption in the world; that’s right, they beat the Brits!
Tea is actually grown in Turkey, mostly by the Black Sea. Turks enjoy drinking their tea from small glasses so that the wonderful color of their black tea from the Black Sea can be fully appreciated.
Roland Petrov