Lemon Tea Traditions: Russian Lemon Tea, Kerala’s Sulaimani and Bengal’s Lebu Cha

This is a home version of the Russian way of making tea, where a strong concentrate is diluted to taste in the cup. Our old Tea 101 recipe says Russian lemon tea “is traditionally made using a samovar, but in the absence of one, you can use your normal teapot as well.”

Our old Tea 101 recipe explains the logic: the tea is “usually made stronger than other recipes,” and only half the cup is filled with the brew, then topped up with water to soften its bitterness. It also gives the old rule for a strong pot: one teaspoon of leaf for each cup, and “one for the pot.”

The samovar, the glass and the sugar

In Russia the strong brew is called zavarka; it sits in a small teapot on top of a samovar, a large urn that keeps water hot all day, and each person tops up a little zavarka with hot water from its tap. For the full story, see How Russians drink tea.

The tea is often served in a glass rather than a cup. As our blog’s Peter Keen describes it, “The Russian podstakannik is typical: this is an ornate metal basket into which the tea glass fits and is protected.”

Sweetness is part of it too. Keen counts Russia, with Turkey and Morocco, among the tea cultures where sugar really does add to the experience, though never in huge amounts: in Turkey, “two sugar cubes is typical.” Russians, as a Russian intern at Teabox told our blog, love their tea black, “most likely sweetened with honey or sugar,” with bowls of jam on the table. Her recipe for smetannik, a layered sour cream cake, is the cake to serve with it.

The Russian habit of lemon in tea also inspired Russian Earl Grey, a blend with lemongrass and orange peel. For the smoky tea that traveled to Russia by camel, read Russian Caravan tea. Classic Assam Black makes a good strong pot for this recipe.

Among the Mappilas, the Muslim community of Malabar, it is the glass that ends a feast. Our blog’s writer Aysha Tanya described it as the unsung hero of the Eid meal: after biryani and dessert, “there is still a little room left for a sulaimani,” a tea “the color of a deep sunset.” Our old Tea 101 post calls it a famous post-lunch tea that is “refreshing, light, and cleanses the palate after a heavy meal.”

Sulaimani is meant to be light and clear, which is why it uses little leaf and a one-minute steep. We shared the same recipe for Eid in 2016. Our old Tea 101 version, for six, doubles it: 6 cups of water, 2 teaspoons of tea, 4 cardamom pods, two 1-inch pieces of cinnamon, 4 teaspoons of lime juice and a few strands of saffron, with sugar or honey to taste.

The drink travels well beyond Kerala. When our blog published a Mumbai tea story, a reader wrote in to say that lemon tea “very much exists in Bombay”: every Muslim eatery “worth its keema pao and bheja fry has a ‘sulemani’ – a black tea served in a glass with a wedge of lemon.”

For where sulaimani sits among India’s many chais, see Types of chai in India and our sulaimani guide, and read the full sulaimani story on our blog.

The writer Jerry Pinto found it in a tiny village. Visiting Amadpur in Bengal for Durga Puja, he discovered “lehbu cha, lemon tea, being served by a tiny stall in the village.” Back home in Mumbai, he wrote, “you find lemon tea only in the homes of the elite or in the tea shops that charge you a bomb,” and ordinary tea shops “would have no idea how to make a light brew and then spike it with lemon.” His readers disagreed, as the sulaimani section above shows. Read A Mumbai tea story for both sides.

That “light brew” is the key. In Kolkata, families queue at loose tea shops to have their own house blend mixed from chests of Darjeeling, Dooars and Assam leaf. Our writer imagined a buyer at the counter worrying over the proportions: “I don’t want some of this and little bit of that… that would be disaster… it wouldn’t go with lemon in that case.” The same story explains Kolkata’s “two-foot tea,” the same leaves brewed twice; read Two-Foot Tea and the Bengali.

Lemon has also been a way into tea for people who did not like it. One of our writers, Chitrita Banerji, remembered that her mother found tea’s taste “obnoxious, with or without milk and sugar. The only way she could drink it down was by adding lime juice to it.”

The habit travels, too. Resham Gellatly and Zach Marks, two Americans who crossed India in search of its chai wallahs, told our blog that back home they had experimented with “lebu cha, mint and lemongrass tea, kahwa – with varying degrees of success.” To make lebu cha at home, follow our everyday lemon tea and sweeten it well.