Country
Azerbaijan
Azerbaijan grows tea in the far southeast, on the Caspian side of the Talysh mountains around Lankaran, and drinks far more than that corner can supply. The arc is the one Georgia ran: a Soviet industry built to a plan, then a collapse when the union and the market went at once. What happened next is the difference. Instead of a craft revival, Azerbaijan built a packing industry, and the brands most Azerbaijanis drink are filled largely with leaf bought abroad.
What grows here
Black tea with green tea alongside it, from the Lankaran-Astara strip in the southeast: Lankaran itself, Astara on the Iranian border, Masalli and Lerik. That corner is effectively the whole crop. A second, much smaller zone sits in the northwest around Zaqatala and Balakan and has never amounted to much. Nothing is sold by garden or by district, so what a buyer is choosing here is a national brand rather than a place.
The ground
The Lankaran lowland is a humid subtropical pocket between the Caspian and the Talysh mountains, the same climatic strip that continues south across the border into Iranian Gilan. Rainfall is high, winters are mild by Caucasian standards and the soils are the acidic ground the plant wants. The Soviet build-out leaned on irrigation as well, with reservoirs put in specifically to water the tea, which is a useful reminder that this is a favourable pocket rather than a uniformly wet region.
What to look for
The label question here is unusually clear-cut. Azerbaijan is a large tea packer and a small tea grower, and the dominant domestic brand openly blends locally grown leaf with tea bought in from India, Sri Lanka, Kenya and Vietnam, so an Azerbaijani brand describes who filled the box rather than where the leaf grew. Look for Lankaran. Packed tea is also a real Azerbaijani export, going to Russia, Georgia and Central Asia, so 'from Azerbaijan' and 'grown in Azerbaijan' come apart in both directions.
How it got here
A Russian planter, M. O. Novoselov, put experimental bushes in near Lankaran in the 1890s and built a factory there in 1896, and the venture failed around 1920. The Soviet state restarted it from the 1930s and pushed hard from the 1950s with machinery and irrigation behind it, making Azerbaijan one of the union's three tea regions, well behind Georgia in scale but employing tens of thousands of people in the southeast by the 1980s. The dissolution of the union and the first Nagorno-Karabakh war ended that within a few years and output collapsed. A state programme running from 2018 to 2027 is the current attempt to rebuild it.
Places in Azerbaijan
Named places inside Azerbaijan. The ones with a page of their own are links.