Where drinks come from
Teas, coffees, juices and milky drinks travelled along trade routes and often changed their names on the way. Each story shows where a drink was first made and how it spread.
21 stories from 5 continents
- Africa · 3
- Asia · 9
- Europe · 5
- North America · 2
- South America · 2
Africa
Lemonade
📍 Cairo, Egypt
The oldest records of lemonade come from medieval Cairo: lemon juice was a busy trade there by the early 1100s, and bottles of qatarmizat, sugared lemon juice, were sold and exported. Paris made it fashionable much later, when vendors sold it from tanks strapped to their backs.
Mursik (smoky fermented milk)
📍 Rift Valley (Kalenjin highlands), Kenya
Mursik is milk fermented for days in a gourd lined with charcoal from a burnt tree branch, which gives it a smoky taste and bluish tint. It comes from the Kalenjin people of Kenya's Rift Valley, and the country's champion runners are welcomed home with it.
Rooibos (red bush tea)
📍 Cederberg, South Africa
Rooibos, Afrikaans for 'red bush', is a caffeine-free brew from a shrub of the Cederberg mountains in South Africa's Western Cape. Khoi-descended communities there were drinking it by the late 1800s, and in 1904 a merchant began trading it as a tea.
Asia
Ayran (salty yogurt drink)
📍 Central Asia
Ayran, yogurt whisked with cold water and a pinch of salt, is often called Turkey's national drink, but it was developed by Turkic tribes in Central Asia. An 11th-century Turkic dictionary already defines it as a 'drink made out of milk'.
Bubble tea
📍 Taiwan
Bubble tea was born in Taiwan's tea houses in the 1980s, when chewy tapioca balls were dropped into sweet milk tea. Two tea rooms, in Taichung and Tainan, still both claim to have done it first.
Coffee (the drink)
📍 Yemen
The coffee plant grows wild in Ethiopia, but roasting and brewing its beans into a drink first took hold in Yemen in the 1400s. Until about 1700 the Yemeni port of Mocha was the world's only gateway for coffee.
.jpg/330px-C%C3%A0_ph%C3%AA_tr%E1%BB%A9ng_Gi%E1%BA%A3ng_(c%C6%A1_s%E1%BB%9F_1_Nguy%E1%BB%85n_H%E1%BB%AFu_Hu%C3%A2n).jpg)
Egg coffee (cà phê trứng)
📍 Hanoi, Vietnam
Hanoi's egg coffee goes back to the 1940s, when milk was scarce: by his family's account, Metropole Hotel bartender Nguyen Van Giang whipped egg yolks with sugar and condensed milk into a thick, sweet foam to top strong coffee. The cup is often served in a bowl of hot water.
Jasmine tea
📍 Fuzhou, Fujian, China
Jasmine tea is tea, usually green, scented with fresh jasmine blossoms that are mixed with the leaves at night, just as the flowers open. The craft was perfected in Fuzhou in southeast China, nicknamed 'the City of Jasmine' since the Song dynasty.
_amidst_Wikimedia_photowalk%2C_mymensingh.jpg/330px-Refreshment_(cold_lassi)_amidst_Wikimedia_photowalk%2C_mymensingh.jpg)
Lassi (yogurt drink)
📍 Punjab (India and Pakistan)
Lassi comes from the Punjab, a farming region spanning northern India and Pakistan, where yogurt (traditionally from water-buffalo milk) is blended with water and either salt and cumin or sugar and cardamom.
Soy milk
📍 China
Soy milk is made by soaking soybeans, grinding them with water, then boiling and straining the mix. China has drunk it for centuries: it was written about by 1365 and sold by street vendors by the 1700s, long before it reached Western supermarkets.
Tarkhuna (green tarragon soda)
📍 Kutaisi, Georgia
Tarragon soda was first mixed in 1887 by Mitrofan Lagidze, a pharmacist's apprentice in Kutaisi, Georgia, who flavoured soda water with his own natural tarragon syrup instead of imported essences. Under names like Tarkhun, the now bright green soda spread across the Soviet Union.
Tea
📍 Yunnan, southwest China
Tea drinking may have begun in China's Yunnan region, where leaves of the native tea plant were first used as medicine. Chinese legend credits the mythical ruler Shennong with discovering it.
Europe
Cortado (espresso cut with milk)
📍 Spain
A cortado is espresso 'cut' (cortado in Spanish) with a little warm milk to soften its bite; abroad it is often made with about equal parts of each. It is a café staple all over Spain, and from there it spread through Latin America and beyond.
Decaf coffee
📍 Bremen, Germany
Decaf was born in Bremen, Germany, where coffee merchant Ludwig Roselius developed the first commercially successful way to strip caffeine from coffee beans in the early 1900s. His caffeine-free coffee went on sale across Europe and later in America.
Oat milk
📍 Lund, Sweden
Oat milk as we know it was created in the early 1990s by food scientist Rickard Öste at Lund University in Sweden, while he was researching lactose intolerance. Oat drinks are recorded from the 1700s, but his was among the first sold commercially.
Ostfriesentee (tea with rock sugar and a cream 'cloud')
📍 East Frisia, Lower Saxony, Germany
East Frisians, on Germany's North Sea coast, are said to drink around 300 litres of tea a year each, more than anyone: a strong, mostly Assam blend poured over a lump of rock sugar, with cream added to form a little 'cloud' and never stirred.
Soda water (fizzy water)
📍 Northern England
In 1767 the chemist Joseph Priestley hung a bowl of water over a vat at a brewery in Leeds, England, and found it turned pleasantly fizzy. He shared his sparkling water with friends and called it his 'happiest' discovery.
North America
Atole (warm corn drink)
📍 Mesoamerica (Mexico & Central America)
Atole is a thick, warm drink of corn dough cooked in water or milk, sweetened and often spiced with cinnamon. It is far older than Spanish colonial rule: Classic Maya painted cups are inscribed with their contents, and cacao and atole are the drinks they name.
Slushie (frozen fizzy drink)
📍 Coffeyville, Kansas, USA
The fizzy slushie was an accident: in 1958 the soda fountain broke at Omar Knedlik's ice-cream stand in Coffeyville, Kansas, so he chilled bottles of soda in the freezer instead. Customers loved the half-frozen fizz, and he built a machine to make more.
South America
Cajuína (golden cashew-apple drink)
📍 Northeast Brazil (Ceará and Piauí)
Cajuína is clear juice of the cashew apple, the fruit the cashew nut hangs from, cooked in sealed bottles until its sugars turn golden. Pharmacist Rodolfo Teófilo created it in northeast Brazil in the 1890s as an alternative to alcohol.
Emoliente (barley herbal brew)
📍 Lima, Peru
Emoliente is a warm brew of toasted barley, flaxseed and herbs such as horsetail, finished with lime and sugar. It grew out of medicinal barley waters brought by the Spanish to colonial Lima, where street sellers once stood on almost every corner.