Black Tea

A big part of Albanian culture is black tea or “Çaji russit”, so I wanted to just talk a bit about that today.

Note: I wrote this post on mobile so pardon any typos that may occur and that I may have missed.

Over here, we drink black tea basically every day, no matter the season. In winter, it warms you up… And in summer, you feel cooler after drink a glass of hot tea.

When serving tea, you basically have two kettles.

The bottom kettle contains hot water that boils and warms up the top kettle. The top kettle contains some water, too, as well as the tea leaves, so that’s where the tea is, essentially.

You pour the water from the top kettle based on how strong you prefer your tea – meanwhile you fill up the rest of your jar with the hot water from the big/lower kettle to dilute it.

Not everyone likes their tea all that strong, after all, though I prefer it darker.

I love that two kettles allow you to dilute it more for people who like it on the lighter side.

Glasses contain typically around 100ml, although some people prefer big glasses with around 400ml in volume.

It’s just a huge part of our culture and eventually I also took my parents’ kettles to my apartment.

There are many tea bars around here, so-called Çajtore.

And over time, teabags with herbal or fruit teas also became popular, in which case you’d speak of “Çaji lulat” aka flower tea.

Çaji russit translates to “Russian tea” btw as it was imported from Russia to Yugoslavia.

Btw, when it comes to coffee, we differentiate between “kafe turkit” (“mokka” or Turkish Coffee) and “neskafe” (Instant Coffee, named by Nescafe, the brand).

It’s a whole thing basically.

While Russians enjoy putting milk or pickled plums into theirs, Albanians typically just add sugar and/or lemons into their glass of tea.

And uh, yeah, been enjoying a few glasses every day over here these days. It’s great, and tea drinking is just sorta the thing you do when you have guests or family over… or just as a pastime.

Hope ya enjoyed today’s ramblings.

This post was originally written by Dan Dicere from Indiecator.

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