Mali: Tuareg Tea

Tea is one of the most universal of all drinks; I can't think of a country that I've visited that hasn't had some kind of tea on offer, even though sometimes it's barely recognisable as such. Drinking tea of some kind is a global phenomenon, and the world is a better place for it.

Teapots and tea bags are common in most western countries – probably the most vexing cultural question is whether or not to put the milk in first – but throughout my travels I've come across local tea that's quite, quite different to tea at home. My first seminal tea experience took place in Hong Kong back in the early 1990s, where I discovered that green tea is simply the best accompaniment to Chinese food, but it was Indonesia that gave me my first taste of a tea that I couldn't get at home. Indonesian tea is slightly aromatic and they serve it weak, in tall glasses and in large volume. After a hot day stalking through the tropical heat of the Indonesian islands there'll always be a flask of hot tea waiting for you outside your hotel room – even in the cheapest places – and although it's identifiable as tea, it's a distinctly Indonesian thing.

India is another great tea experience. Although famous for producing such subtle teas as Darjeeling and Assam, served in silver and with colonial elegance, real Indian tea – or chai – is practically unrecognisable. It's brewed for ages by boiling up milk and sugar, and dipping what looks like an old sock into the mixture (the tea leaves, it turns out, are stashed in this sock). The tea is poured many times and from a great height throughout the brewing process, and the result is a sickly sweet, dark brown concoction that almost totally fails to quench the raging thirst that the Indian climate produces. It's a fantastic drink, and sitting on a charpoy drinking chai with your mates is practically India's national sport. It's wonderful.

Tuareg Tea

Tea is huge in north Africa, too, where it has assumed a social significance that makes the English habit of taking tea at four o'clock look positively blasé. The north African tea ceremony is well known to be the oil in the cogs of commerce from Morocco to Egypt; it spread along with the Sahara's nomadic tribes from the Berbers in the northwest to the Tuareg in the Sahara, and if you ever try to buy a carpet in a carpet shop or a pair of slippers in a souq, you'll be offered tea. It's an unavoidable part of life in desert Africa.

The Tuareg are particularly into their tea ceremonies, and as you wander through countries where the Tuareg proliferate, such as Mauritania, Niger and Mali, you see people brewing tea everywhere. The process goes a little bit like this:

• Take your time. If you're in a rush, then making tea will drive you nuts. Kick back into African time – perhaps by pretending that you're waiting for a bus to fill up – and slow down your actions. Making Tuareg tea is a ponderous, plodding process, and if you try to rush it, Allah will simply find a way of forcing you to slow down. Relax, take a deep breath, and procrastinate.

• You now need to light your charcoal burner. The best models are made from clay and consist of a shallow bowl with holes in the bottom, supported underneath by a cylindrical column with a large hole in one side. The charcoal sits in the top in the shallow bowl, so the wind can blow through the various holes to keep it red hot; stack some charcoal on the top, slap in some paper impregnated with lighter fuel, and light it up like a barbecue. If you're in the desert and don't have a stove, a small wood fire will suffice. There's normally enough wood in the scrubby Sahel to start a fire; if you're in the dunes, you'll have to carry your own fuel.

• Wait for the coals to start glowing, while fanning the stove with a flag-shaped fan made from weaved grass. If you're feeling efficient you can start preparing the teapot at this stage, but feel free to sit around doing nothing while the fire settles, if you prefer. There's no rush, after all.

• Once the coals are glowing red, you need to fish out your teapot. This all-metal affair, normally painted blue, is shaped like a normal round teapot, with a long spout, a hinged lid on top and a handle at the opposite side to the spout. Put a heap of tea leaves into the pot, along with a little water, and pop it on the stove, directly onto the coals. The tea you choose depends on who you are; some people, like the Berbers of Morocco and Algeria, like mint tea, whereas the Tuareg prefer green tea. It's up to you, really; you can even brew up a pot of each, if you want. There are no rules.

• Soon enough the water starts to boil and froth out of the teapot's spout, and this is a sign to start brewing the tea. Fish out up to three glasses, each of them the size of a shot glass and made from thick, colourless glass, and start the concoction process. Pour water into one glass, filling it right to the top, and tip this into the pot. Do this three times, put the teapot back on the coals, and if you're looking for something else to do, rinse the glasses in water, making sure you don't waste more water than you have to. This is the desert; water is precious.

• It won't be long before the pot is boiling again, spurting steam out of the spout and quite possibly bubbling around the sides of the lid. Pour white sugar into one glass, filling it right to the top, and tip the sugar into the pot. Fill this glass with tea from the pot, starting to pour from a low height and raising the teapot as high as you can before bringing it low again as the glass fills, and take the glass and pour it back into the teapot with a flick of the wrist. Repeat.

• And repeat. And repeat. This part of the process can go on for ages, with some tea pourers pouring and tipping 20 or 30 times to get the tea to the right strength. When you think your tea is ready, leave a little bit in the glass and taste it; if you want your tea to be stronger, or you want it sweeter, then keep on pouring or adding sugar as required.

• If, however, the tea is ready, fill the glasses with the same high-pouring action, so each glass gets a good frothy head on it, and pass them round. You should get three glasses from each pot, and it's important that they're all drunk; if there are two of you, pour a glass for your guest, then another one for them, and then one for yourself.

• Drink the tea in short slurping sips. It won't be too hot to drink, as all the pouring will have cooled it down to a drinkable temperature, and before you know it, it'll be gone. And then it's probably time for another pot, if you have time... which you almost certainly do.

And that's the Tuareg tea ceremony, a routine you see performed everywhere, all the time, from the side of the road to the deck of a pinasse. It's not so much the tea as the whole ceremony that goes with it; it's the tea drinkers' equivalent of rolling your own cigarettes, and it's just as satisfying.