Okay, question here for anyone who knows anything about turkish tea,
or may be able to read turkish and find out. What exactly is the
difference between "altinbas çay", "çay çiçeği", and the tea that
comes in the yellow packages marked "turist çay"? Altinbas and çiçeği
taste exactly the same to me, but not as strong as the turist stuff. I
can read the english and french, and decipher the german on the
packages, but it's no help. Thanks in advance for your assistance.

On May 30, 10:36Â*pm, TeaDave > wrote:
> Okay, question here for anyone who knows anything about turkish tea,
> or may be able to read turkish and find out. What exactly is the
> difference between "altinbas çay", "çay çiçeği", and the tea that
> comes in the yellow packages marked "turist çay"? Altinbas and çiçeği
> taste exactly the same to me, but not as strong as the turist stuff. I
> can read the english and french, and decipher the german on the
> packages, but it's no help. Thanks in advance for your assistance.

I won't be much help, but this is what I know as far as direct word
translations:

çay = Tea or Stream
turist = Tourist, Sightseer
çiçeği = Flower, Blossom, Bloom
altinbas = Gold, Gold Coin (comes from the word altin)

On May 31, 3:36Â*am, TeaDave > wrote:
> Okay, question here for anyone who knows anything about turkish tea,
> or may be able to read turkish and find out. What exactly is the
> difference between "altinbas çay", "çay çiçeği", and the tea that
> comes in the yellow packages marked "turist çay"? Altinbas and çiçeği
> taste exactly the same to me, but not as strong as the turist stuff. I
> can read the english and french, and decipher the german on the
> packages, but it's no help. Thanks in advance for your assistance.

All these are brands of loose tea marketed by the Turkish state tea
organisation Caykur see http://www.caykur.gov.tr/english/detay.asp?detay=7
Caykur has many brands but their tea blending is suspect. When in
Turkey try Deren Brand tea for a better quality (I can boast this as
their consultant since 2004). Around 80% of Turkey's annual
production of 180,000 tonnes of tea is manufactured by Caykur who
relinquished their monopoly in 1985 - I worked then in Turkey for four
tea seasons specifying, building, commissioning and optimizing the
first privately built tea factory for Lipton up on the Black Sea coast
and was caught in the fallout from Chernobyl in April 2006. Apart
from our tea samples having to be disposed of as "low grade
radioactive waste" when we brought them back to England, we suffered
no ill effects though the tea reached 48,000 bequerels per kg (the EU
limit was 500). Now the tea is well below the limit and even below
that of teas from volcanic soil areas like Kenya.

Nigel at Teacraft