Drinks and Ceylon Tea Recipes

Kiri Te

Sri Lankan Milk Tea

Sri Lankan kiri te, also called Ceylon milk tea or kiri they, is strong black tea brewed dark, then sweetened with condensed milk (or hot milk and sugar). Often, it's pulled between two cups to get a frothy top. It drinks bolder and sweeter than a Western cuppa. It's the daily ritual at every roadside tea kiosk and home kitchen. This is the cup that opens the morning, breaks the afternoon and rounds off a plate of short eats.

Belimal Tea

Belimal tea, also called bael flower tea or beli mal tea, is a gentle, caffeine-free Sri Lankan herbal infusion. You steep dried bael flowers in hot water until the cup turns a soft, fragrant amber. It tastes lightly floral and faintly honeyed, and most people sip it plain or barely sweetened. In Sri Lankan homes it has long been kept as a calming drink, valued for digestion and quiet comfort. Honestly, it's one of the easiest herbal teas you can make: a small handful of dried blossoms, hot water, and a few unhurried minutes of steeping.

Ranawara Tea

Ranawara tea, also called cassia flower tea, is a golden, caffeine-free Sri Lankan herbal infusion. You brew it from the bright yellow flowers of the ranawara plant, Senna auriculata, known as Tanner's cassia. Fresh or dried, the little flowers steep into a mild, lightly earthy and gently sweet tisane. It has long been valued in traditional wellness, often talked about for blood sugar, and it makes a clean, refreshing cup to sip through the day.

Thambili

King Coconut

Across Sri Lanka, that bright orange coconut is thambili, or king coconut if you like. It's grown almost entirely for its water, which is cool, lightly sweet and faintly salty, and you sip it straight from the shell. The green drinking coconut is a different thing. Thambili is the one you find at roadside stalls all over the island, cracked open and handed over as a natural electrolyte refresher. Get a young one and you'll also find a soft, jelly-like layer of flesh inside to scoop and eat. This is the original no-cook cooler: choose it, open it, drink it.

Kirala Juice

Kirala juice, also called mangrove apple juice, is a traditional cooling Sri Lankan drink made from the soft, sour-sweet pulp of the kirala fruit (the mangrove apple, Sonneratia caseolaris). It's a small round green fruit that grows wild in the coastal mangrove lagoons. To make the drink, the pulp gets scooped out and mashed with water, sweetened with sugar or jaggery, and often loosened with a splash of thick coconut milk before it's strained and served ice cold. It's tangy and mellow and refreshing, the sort of flavour that reminds plenty of people of wood apple (divul). Along the southern coast, it's a much loved roadside cooler.

Veralu Juice

Veralu juice, also called Ceylon olive juice, is a properly refreshing, tangy Sri Lankan drink made from veralu, the small green Ceylon olive (Elaeocarpus serratus). It is a firm, ovoid fruit with a single hard stone. You deseed the fruit and crush or blend it with water, sweeten it with sugar, and balance it with a pinch of salt and a hint of ginger or lime, then strain it into a cool, pale, antioxidant-rich nectar for hot days. Bright and sour at first sip, then mellow and sweet behind it, veralu juice is the up-country cousin of the island's fruit coolers, made from a fruit that is just as loved as a salty-sour pickle.