Butter Tea (Suyo Cha)

Butter tea is made by boiling pressed brick tea for a long time, then adding yak butter, fresh milk and salt, pouring the mixture into a tall cylindrical wooden churn and working it until emulsified; the result is brownish-red, richly oily and salty-savory.

Tibetans have drunk butter tea for at least a thousand years, closely connected to the tea trade along the Tea Horse Road; the high-calorie butter combined with warming tea provides ideal sustenance in the cold high altitude.

Served hot in wooden bowls or traditional Tibetan cups, it is central to Tibetan hospitality—an empty bowl must be refilled at once. Eaten with tsampa, it forms the classic Tibetan breakfast.

Salty and rich, with the distinctive grassy tang of yak butter blending with tea, it tastes intensely savoury at first and grows more familiar with habit; it is found in every temple, tea house and home in Lhasa.