Turkish apple tea or elma çay is a delicious apple-flavoured fruit tisane. Apparently, it’s been used increasingly by shopkeepers in the Mediterranean to tempt customers into their stalls. With many tourists returning to their country with a taste for it, fittingly, my first encounter was with the Turkish Apple and Turkish Apple & Cinnamon Tisanes in the comfort of T2.
This Dogadan Turkish Apple Tea is in tea bag form and produced in Turkey itself. Indeed, I’d stumbled upon it in a Mediterranean food section awkwardly situated between the deli and the fresh produce at Coles one week.
Infusing 1 tea bag in 200 mL of just boiled water yields a brilliant red liquor in stark contrast to the golden yellow or brown that I’ve experienced with other Turkish apple teas. The infusion smells of apple with very generous notes of cinnamon. A first sip, though, sees the flavour of juicy, sweet red apples with a slight acidity recalling hibiscus came through in the head and into the body, before mellow notes of cinnamon than suggested by the aroma emerge towards the end of the body. The finish sees the slight acidity returning and leaving an aftertaste of juicy apple with just a hint of cinnamon.
This Dogadan Apple Fruit Tea contained 20 tea bags. It was packed in Turkey and purchased in Sydney, Australia in 2014.