Sometimes you can find instant iced tea mix, with powdered milk already in the mix. Maybe that’s the “dust”. There are no spices in the non-instant one I buy that I linked to in the OP. It’s straight tea with yellow food coloring. The tea has quite a strong tea flavor when you open the package.
Oh, well, at least I can buy the colored one.
Actually, a coworker made some this week and I tried it. I thought it had a smoky, woodsy quality.
I still prefer Chai tea, even if it’s an old fad.
My sister just told me that at 7-Elevens in Thailand she has seen iced tea- and iced coffee slurpies.
Not being a Slurpee fan, I’ve never noticed those. However, in the interests of research I took a peek in the shop downstairs in our compound. We live in one of four 36-story towers grouped together, and there are some small businesses downstairs, including a little mom-and-pop-style convenience store. There are a number of coffee drinks and quite a few tea drinks, although for the latter it’s mostly Japanese types and straight lemon tea etc. There is one type of “milk tea,” and I picked up a couple of bottles. Bale brand (pronounced “Ba-lay”), a Japanese brand manufactured here under license. It lists the ingredients as black tea (23.5%), sugar (7.6%), milk powder (2.5%) and barley (.35%). That adds up to only 33.95% though.
We did a supermarket run just yesterday, so it will be a few more days, but I’ll take a look the next time I’m in one.
Thai tea has always tasted like a bit of Lapsang Souchong tea is used in the mix. The leaves of Lapsang are dried over a smoky fire, and it does have a very woodsy, smoky taste.
Oh, and that Bale brand was not the least bit red. Just milky brown. Obviously not traditional Thai ice tea.
Thank you for your research!
The wife and I were in Tops Supermarket tonight, but all we could find were little UHT boxes of Ivy-brand “Thai traditional tea.” Ivy is produced just outside of Bangkok by IP Manufacturing, which I believe is a local company.
Unfortunately, it only lists the ingredients as tea (90.5%), sugar (7.5%) and milk powder (2%). At least it adds up to 100% this time. Being in one of those little cartons you poke a straw through, it was difficult to determine the color, but I think it may have been reddish. It says on the box that it’s made with an old, traditional recipe. (No doubt along with an old, traditional UHT process, too.)
Tops is a local chain. It’s not too bad, but it’s a bit of a low-class outfit that tries to dress itself up as high class. We use it only because it’s so close to our place. This weekend we’ll be in a true Western-style supermarket, and the variety there is normally much better.
So, when Thais buy regular tea at the supermarket (not iced tea mix), what kind is it? (I’m referring to variety, like oolong, lapsang souchong, etc.) Or do they just drink stuff like Lipton’s?
I once got a box of no-brandname tea from the Dollar store that tasted a lot like Thai tea. It was just called Ceylon tea on the box.
Lipton’s is actually a big brand here, sold in cans and small PET bottles. There’s lemon and peach flavors. Good stuff, too. Cans and bottles tend to be that or Japanese stuff. They do sell teabags, but the wife and I are not big tea drinkers, preferring coffee, as do most Thais judging by the proliferation of coffee drinks and small selection of tea drinks. The sizeable ethnic-Chinese community, such as the wife’s family, probably drinks more tea, but evn among them the younger generation is turning more toward coffee. (We have almost 150 Starbucks across the country, plus other chains, local and international.) and even though the wife does enjoy the occasional cup of tea, it’s rare, and she doesn’t really know anything about tea (just like her uncle says).
I just looked through the cupboard, and I see there’s a partially used box of Java black tea, Orange Spice flavor, that I think a colleague of the wife’s brought back for her from Indonesia and which has been sitting there for a long time now I think. That’s all we have in the house that I can see. (The wife’s at work right now.)
Okay, this may be my final word on the subject. The wife and I were in the supermarket in The Emporium shopping center today, a super-modern place targeted at Westerners and wealthy Thais. They usually have a great variety of stuff, but while they had the requisite gazillion choices of coffee drinks, we could find only two traditional Thai drinks. Or one, depending on how you define it.
The one we’re not sure about is a bottle of “milk tea” of the Nuboon brand, which is made locally by a Thai company despite the Japanese-sounding name. (Japanese tea is so popular here that the name was probably chosen especially.) Owned by the giant local conglomerate called the Saha Group. More of a brown color, rather than reddish. Ingredients are listed as sugar (20%), sweetened condensed milk (5%) and tea (3.5%). That adds up to only 28.5%, and the fact that the actual amount of tea is so small is a little disconcerting.
The other one is a UHT carton. The local Mali brand. (Mali is Thai for “jasmine” and is also a popular girl’s name.) Mali is a big brand here, possibly best known for their sweetened condensed milk. This one specifically says it is “traditional Thai tea with milk.” Ingredients are listed as liquid tea (50%) – I guess as opposed to tea leaves or powdered mix – cow’s milk (27.5%), sugar (8% and powdered low-fat milk (2%). That’s only 87.5%. We’ve not tried this one yet, and since it’s in a carton, we can’t verify the reddish color, but since it’s billed as traditional, we suspect it will be reddish.
We looked for mixes, and there was none. Not being tea drinkers, we never noticed such a shortage of tea. At least, not this type of tea. I do buy bottles or cans of Japanese lemon tea or Lipton’s – they taste about the same – but considering the shortage of traditional Thai tea drinks and the plethora of coffee drinks, I’ve decided that marketers in the West are taking advantage of Westerners’ (sometimes overly) romantic notions of the Mysterious East to flog the stuff you’re finding over there. Looks like the only way to find authentic traditional Thai milk tea in Thailand is to buy it at a drink stand from staff who don’t really know how it’s made.
We did also have lunch today with the wife’s uncle, the tea aficionado, and his family in honor of his 82nd birthday coming soon. (He claims 83, but he’s using the Chinese style of counting, which puts you at one year old upon birth.) We asked, and naturally his line remains any tea in Thailand is garbage and only his special super tea leaves from somewhere deep in China are any good.
Thank you, Siam Sam.
Just another service from your friendly neighborhood Siam Sam. 
EDIT: Although I am a spelling idiot. 
First of all I congratulate needscoffee on the username/thread name combo.
But what I came here to say is that I am drinking some great iced tea which, to me, tastes a lot like what I get in the local Thai restaurant. Celestial Seasonings decaf sweet coconut Thai Chai tea. (Thai Chai? That’s what they call it.)
Ingredients: Rooibos, decaffeinated black tea, cinnamon, roasted chicory, ginger, natural coconut flavor with other natural flavors (contains soy lecithin), cloves, cardamom, nutmeg, paprika, black pepper and Chinese star anise.
Gluten free, naturally decaffeinated.
Thanks. I wonder if it’s the coconut flavor that tastes like Thai iced tea. None that I’ve ever had had any of the other flavorings in it, but coconut flavor could taste somewhat like the sweetened condensed milk. I’m definitely going to try it. My daughter, especially, loves to drink the iced tea, and she can’t drink it at night without it keeping her awake. This would be a great solution for her. It’s one of the reasons I wanted to know what kind of tea they use for Thai iced tea, so that I could look for a decaf version.
I don’t know about Chai, but cha is Thai for “tea.”
From Wikipedia:
It’s tra in Vietnamese. (As seen in the Vietnamese-writing section of the OP’s link.) In Lao, which does not have the “ch” sound at all, it’s sa, but the same derivative. Cha also in some Chinese dialects, although pronounced a bit differently, tones and all that.
It’s cha in Konkani as well. It might be chai in Marathi, though. I only understand that language (can’t verbalize it as well).