What tea would you start with to make Tibetan style tea?

I had Tibetan Butter Tea at Makye Ame (Beijing), and did not like it. Yak butter tea tastes like drinking butter...thick butter flavor...and that's it...*shudder* I couldn't finish but half a cup, let alone the whole pot! I do recommend Yak as a delicious meat, though!

If you still wanna give it a try, I can you that tou tea is just toucha, which is shaped pu-erh, and available all over. Also, the "bao yan" ("holy flame") brick series produced by Xiaguan tea factory is one of the most popular bricks amongst Tibetans. You can get it many places online. I'm unsure if the green/raw or black/cooked version is drunk more often, though, and I'm not sure which kind was in the Tibetan tea I had (because it tasted so much like butter and so little like anything else!).

Darnit. Right now I really could go for some mutton ribs or stone-cooked yak!

Why would you want to drink that kind of tea anyway? It's terrible. I could only drink 1 cup of it, and that's it; never mind a whole pot. It tastes nothing like tea. And there's mostly just a salty, butter taste. It's very oily and brothy like soup. I guess it's an acquired taste. Not to my liking anyway.

I think milk tea tastes much better, especially earl grey milk tea.

All I know is, Hunan, Yunnnan and Sichuan all make various forms of tea bricks. So I guess any of them would be suitable for making buttered tea.

I think they usually just use black tea to make their "su you cha", but it's mostly milk/butter. Someone from Tibet once told me that they originally drank it without tea leaves (long while ago), and they only started adding tea to improve the flavor. It's really freezing up there, and they drink it for nutrition. It's one of those things they use for survival.

I guess it wasn't supposed to become popular.

Thanks to everyone for their responses, esp. Jason F. who gave me good suggestions as to the original topic.

But you know it is possible to like Tibetan tea (which I used to have in a Tibetan restaurant in NYC) just for that strong unusual flavor...

Ozzy

snip

Ozzy, I wanted to try this type of tea too, I ordered several cooked puerh bricks from Yunnan Sourcing for this (and I did get the cheaper brick "flame" type puerh (the invoice says 2004 Xiaguan Tibetan Baoyan Pu-erh tea

250 gm brick) and made the tea according to the recipe at www. tanc.org. I don't ahve a churn so I jsut used a blender and of course fresh butter. While it was interesting it was too rich for me to drink frequently but it was really very unique. It really was quite brothy as someone said. It also reminded me a little (in that I was drinking a hot buttered liquid) of hot buttered rum, but the taste with the tea is brothy. I'd say give it a try, it's an interesting experience, but probably use a cooked puerh you like anyway, just so if you can't stand it with butter you can at least drink it plain. Oh, and make sure your butter is fresh and without refrigerator smells because those will carry over into the drink, nasty. I did use salted butter...you might want to be careful about how much extra salt you add if you use already salted butter. To taste.

Melinda

"Melinda" wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@corp.supernews.com:

Thanks. Melinda. I'd thought of the Tibetan mushroom too... Good point abt the butter -- I hadn't thought of that.

Ozzy

I've heard that the Tibetan style of tea--esp. with authentic rancid yak butter--is not very easy for non-Tibetans to acquire a taste for. It's main selling point--again, from hearsay--is that it's a valuable source of calories for people who walk up and down a himalaya or two on a regular basis...

Ozzy wrote:

snipped-for-privacy@i39g2000cwa.googlegroups.com5/21/06

04: snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.com [On Tibet butter tea]

Imagine yourself out there on the steppes, thirty degrees below zero (F [or even C]), hungry, tired, shivering in your heavy leathers and wools, and somebody hands you a salty butter tea. Go for it, I say. What you like in the comfort of your livingroom might differ from what you'll like in cold frost of the high passes.

Disclaimer: Never been there, but I have come off the very cold desert and off mountain passes in Iran to *very* sweet glasses of tea and it hit the spot, trust me on this.

Michael

OzzyXns97CAE6066443ETheLoneAndLevelSands@216.196.97.1425/21/06

22: snipped-for-privacy@ng.please

Hate to clue ya, but fresh butter is not what this tea is all about. Rather the opposite I have it on good authority. Michael

yeah it's more of an attempt to make palatable a dramatic ingestion of fat calories so a guy can work all day in the cold and at altitude.

I'd try it, to be sure, just to see what it's like, but unless you have a hard, labor-filled life, a daily diet of the stuff will make you incredibly fat and very unhealthy.

I think if you live your life on the tundra or a highland, you develop a taste for sugary and fatty foods. Or rather, they start to taste like food instead of candy. Sugary bread, meat with huge swathes of lard running through them, butter/cream in your tea/coffee, etc.

And if you live in a desert or a tropic, you start to love the chile.

(N.B. It's when you mix the two cuisines that you lose your friends and your self-respect...)

--Blair

Yeah I know Michael, I was making a concession to my Westerner's taste. Besides, I don't keep rancid butter laying around my fridge...that's called unsanitary over here.

(Wouldn't a person have to leave their butter OUT to get it to go rancid? I have no idea how to rancidify butter...)

Melinda

I seem to recall reading that rancid fats of any kind are the absolute worst thing you can eat in terms of health, almost as sure a route to cancer and degenerative diseases as smoking... Maybe old-time Tibetans didn't have much of a life expectancy past 30s/40s anyway.

Mel> > OzzyXns97CAE6066443ETheLoneAndLevelSands@216.196.97.1425/21/06

I don't know why it never occurred to me before, but now it has: do we know for a fact that Tibetans *prefer* butter tea rancid? I mean, there's plenty of reason for butter to turn rancid without refrigeration, but is that what they're aiming for?

/Lew

good point.. I guess the thing to ask would be -- if they had a choice, what would they drink? Then drink that. Knowing that I bet we should be drinking Coke.

Hi Ozzy,

I have some Hu Nan brick tea (black tea), dated 1966, which you may find useful should you ever find some rancid yak-butter to go with it... ;).

Regards, Dan

Butter keeps an awfully long time if its salted, up to 6 months in a fridge, 2 years in a freezer, and probably a month at most unrefridgerated. You'd have to have a lot of butter laying around for it to go rancid before the family uses it all. Growing up, we left the butter out of the fridge in its covered dish, but a stick lasted at most 2 weeks before we had used it. Imagine how much butter the Tibetans must have lying around if they drink pots of it daily!

The butter at Makye Ame was not rancid, and the Tibetans working there preferred to drink their Tibetan brandy over any butter tea they served. After having some myself, and finding it a more delightful, more fiery, less heavy version of kirschwasser, I can't blame them!

Lewis snipped-for-privacy@panix1.panix.com5/23/06 15: snipped-for-privacy@panix.com

A bit of projection, and off we go: It happened by accident, and now we wouldn't have it any other way. There are tons of examples of that, Pu'erh first and foremost among them. Michael

I thought they called it cheese?

--scott