Food Fables – How Turkey shows that Indian tea’s future might be black

The monsoon is time for drinking tea, not growing it. Rain makes the bushes grow too fast, producing a harsh, vegetal tasting leaf. This monsoon growth is just trimmed and used for mulch, but some is now used to make green tea for consumers more focussed on perceived health benefits than taste.

This might be a good time for tea planters to relax, but downtime seems to induce anxiety. Every June-July brings news of how auction rates for the second flush (picked and processed before the rains) are down, climate change is blighting the bushes, tea gardens are being turned into hill resorts and Indian consumers aren’t drinking more tea.

Since India is the second largest tea consumer, at 6 million tonnes each year, perhaps we are just full? But China’s annual consumption of 14.5 million tonnes dwarfs us, and our per capita consumption is relatively low, at around 0.33 kilos. One answer to increasing demand might lie in how India started drinking tea, almost exactly a century ago.


Until the end of the 19th century most tea produced in India was for export. But by then the excess capacity of tea plantations made the industry decide to develop the domestic market, especially for low-end tea that wasn’t wanted abroad. A campaign was launched to persuade Indians to drink tea. At first, it flopped. Indians didn’t like this bitter brew. In some cases, it was reported, people ate the leaves, but didn’t drink the infusion.

World War I helped change this. Thousands of Indian soldiers drawn into the conflict were made familiar with tea brewed the British army way – strong, sweet and milky. They brought this taste home, and it spread from their camps. Indians had also started figuring out their own way to drink tea, with added spices, to make masala chai. Our love for milk, sugar and spices was so great we were even willing to drink tea made with them.

Chai is so identified with India’s tea drinking today that it’s hard to imagine it otherwise. Yet another country took to drinking tea, without milk, in almost the same time frame, and became the world’s largest per capita consumer, at 3.16 kilos each year. This is Turkey where there was little tea consumption till the 1920s, when the country’s new leader, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk included tea drinking with the sweeping changes he imposed on Turks, like wearing Western clothes and using the Roman alphabet.

Ataturk wanted a break with the Ottomans, whose empire was criticised with causing Turkey’s recent centuries of weakness. Coffee was associated with the Imperial court, but there was also a practical reason. The Ottomans had accepted unequal trade treaties that undermined local producers. Coffee was imported (mainly from Yemen, which had briefly been a distant Ottoman possession) and couldn’t grow in Turkey’s temperate climate. But the cool, rainy Black Sea coast was ideal for growing tea.

Turkish tea was drunk the Central Asian way, very sweet and without milk. Sugar gave the drink more energy, and was also locally sourced, from sugar beet, which again was promoted by Ataturk’s government (Turkey is now the world’s fifth largest producer). And it is notable that many of the world’s largest consumers, like China, Iran and Morocco drink their tea without milk. Even in South Asia, where milky tea rules, shortages of fresh milk have pushed consumers in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, to use condensed milk, or go black.

This isn’t a call to cull chai, but a suggestion that further growth in India could come by promoting black tea. It is already popular in parts of the country, like Bengal’s lebu chai or South India’s sulaimani chai. Orthodox tea, the best long leaf teas, should be drunk plain, to appreciate their subtle flavours. Phalap, the indigenous smoked tea from the Northeast, is also drunk plain. The tea industry should consider that its future might be truly black!