Country
Turkey
Turkey is one of the largest tea producers in the world and one you have almost certainly never drunk, because it keeps nearly all of it. The crop comes from a single strip of coast, Rize province on the Black Sea, and it exists to feed a domestic habit measured in glasses a day rather than cups a week. A steep import tariff keeps foreign tea out and points the whole system inward.
What grows here
Black tea, and effectively nothing else. It comes from a narrow coastal band in the northeast, centred on Rize and running into Trabzon and Artvin, squeezed between the Pontic mountains and the sea. Small quantities of green tea and flavoured blends are made for the home market. There is no regional hierarchy of the kind Sri Lanka or India has: Turkish tea is sold by grade and by brand, never by garden.
The ground
The one part of Turkey with the climate for it: humid subtropical, rained on heavily and evenly all year, with winters moderated by the sea and cool nights coming off the mountains behind. The gardens are small terraced plots on steep slopes above fishing towns, held by thousands of families rather than by estates. Those cool nights are also the basis of the local claim that the crop needs little or no pesticide, which is worth treating as a claim, although the climate argument behind it is sound.
The bushes
Seedling populations descended from stock brought in from Georgia, just across the border, where Russian growers had already shown tea would survive on this coast. Turkey never built its industry on named cultivars, so the plant material is mixed and chosen by survival rather than by flavour, which is one reason Turkish tea has a consistent house character rather than a range of them.
Harvest seasons
Roughly May to October, in a series of cuts. The first, in May and June, is the best and is graded and paid for accordingly, and each later cut is coarser. Winter shuts the crop down completely, which makes Turkey one of the few large producers with a genuine off-season.
How it is made here
Harvesting is done with shears that slice the shoot rather than pluck it, so the leaf reaching the factory is coarse and full of stalk. It is then run through a hybrid the industry calls the ÇAYKUR method: orthodox rolling, a rotorvane maceration in the middle to break the cells properly, then a second pressed rolling. Neither orthodox nor CTC, it yields the small broken grades the çaydanlık needs, a stacked pair of pots with water boiling below and a concentrate steeping above, poured into tulip glasses and cut with water to taste. A tea built to be diluted is a different design brief from one drunk as brewed.
What to look for
Very little genuine Turkish tea reaches export markets, so the first question is whether it is Turkish at all, and Rize is the name to look for. The state tea enterprise, ÇAYKUR, buys and processes a large share of the crop and its brands dominate at home, with private producers alongside it. A small specialty trade in first-cut leaf has appeared, but it is not what a supermarket sells. Do not expect fine whole leaf: judging Turkish tea as a single-origin orthodox black misses what it was made for.
How it got here
Turkish tea was a deliberate state project rather than an organic tradition. Legislation in 1924 directed planting in Rize, and the crop only took hold after a large seed import from Batumi in Georgia in 1937. The first factory opened in Rize in 1947, the state took the industry over as a monopoly and private processing was only permitted from 1984. Rize was a poor province before the crop arrived and its economy is now built on it, which is why tea carries political weight in Turkey far out of proportion to its export value.
Places in Turkey
Named places inside Turkey. The ones with a page of their own are links.