Turkish Tea Pot

Turkish Tea Pot

My Istanbul couchsurfing host, Cihan, thought that it was funny that I was completely perplexed and baffled by his double decker tea pot:

In making Turkish tea, you fill the bottom pot with only water and the top pot with both water and tea. You then put the entire apparatus over the stove to cook.
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Wade from Vagabond Journey.com
in Istanbul, Turkey- February 12, 2009
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In making tea this way, you can control how strong you want it to be. The tea in the top part is very condensed and is not meant to be drank directly, and the bottom pot just has plain water in it, which is ultimately meant to dilute the condensed tea. So you pour a little of the condensed tea from the top pot into a glass and then dilute it with the boiled water from the bottom pot, until you have your desired strength of tea.

Another advantage of making tea in this two pot system is that there is not a chance for the tea in the pot to get too strong to consume, as you always have the boiled water to dilute it in your glass.

Cihan demonstrating how to use the two pot system. The small pot has the condensed tea which you then dilute with the boiled water in the large pot.

This way of tea preparation is ingenious, as it enables people to drink multiple glasses of tea from the same batch without the threat of it getting too bitter. I do not know why this system has not been adopted by other tea drinking cultures.

Related Pages:
Hangzhou China Tea Farms
Longjing Dragon Well Tea in China

Turkish Tea Pot