• A female customer visited Mohammed Ali’s restaurant in Doha.
• She drank the karak tea.
• She even demanded the karak tea, while giving birth.

A female customer who frequented Mohammed Ali’s restaurant in Doha, Qatar’s capital, every day with a flask of karak tea is the subject of his tale.

Her driver brought the flask one day and informed him that the woman was in the hospital getting about to give birth. She required her karak, though.

She arrived the following day with her flask.

Ali was referring to a 65-year-old, unremarkable restaurant on Doha’s Old Airport Road, not a well-known chain.

The fact that the nation’s kaftheeriyas (cafes) serve hundreds of cups of karak every day, with the majority charging merely 1 riyal ($0.27) a cup, indicates the tea’s popularity.

Entering the store is not required. When you blast your car’s horn, someone will quickly approach it and be prepared to take your order.

Prior to the advent of Instagram and social media influencers, the secret to pulling the numbers was to develop a successful karak recipe.

To develop flavors, the kaftheeriyas experimented with various combinations of spices, milk, and tea leaves, Ali continued.

If the flavor is appealing and the location is ideal, the business virtually ever fails.

Although the account of how Karak arrived in Qatar is somewhat controversial, it is generally accepted that South Asian expats in the country brought the milky tea with them.

The land-owning, agrarian Moplah Muslims of the North Malabar region of India currently control the karak market in Qatar.

According to Rafeeq Thiruvalloor, a Malayalam writer from North Malabar, “when agriculture went bust, youngsters from feudal households found the Gulf region as a haven where they could make money doing any type of work away from home and without shame.”

The Malabaris who brought samovar tea to Qatar are the same ones.

Samovar and karak have a similar appearance, but the latter is quickly climbing the popularity rankings and piquing Qatari citizens’ attention.

A karak is strong by definition, as the name suggests. Samovar is only powerful when called upon. When karak is currently served, canned, processed milk is used to give it a thick consistency. New milk is used in Samovar.

There aren’t many possibilities for karaks in terms of sugar content. Unless specifically requested, karaks in Qatar are very sugary.

But a sweet samovar cup must be ordered in advance. Most samovar tea stores allow you to come in and specify your preferences, including strong, medium, light, waterless, well-beaten, and unbeaten.

Some karak tea businesses offered “fresh-milk tea” prior to the invention of the samovar upon request, albeit at a double cost. There was also a “Sri Lankan tea,” which was just the karak that had been battered.

Software programmer Sajeer bin Abbas claimed that the teabag-infused karak provided in Oman, where he spent seven years working, made him stop drinking tea there.

One of the perks of working in Qatar, he continued, is samovar tea.

Before 2014, no one can recall ever seeing a samovar tea establishment in Qatar. Even though the number is currently around 100, one would see sizable crowds outside the shops selling it.

The appeal of samovars is nostalgia. Bicycles mounted on the wall, vintage radios, and a replica installation of three-wheeled tuk-tuk rickshaws are among the paraphernalia in Fereej Bin Mahmoud’s Chaya Kada.

He stated that the practice of Samovar tea manufacturers to pour another layer of decoction atop the foam occasionally causes a severe discomfort in the mouth.

Salman, the tea maker of Madinat Khalifa’s Kismath Restaurant, is a busy man. He just mentioned that throughout his shift, he produces 700 cups of tea.

Samovar tea shops offer a sense of community, or “vibes,” in areas like Matar Qadeem, where hundreds of young people reside and where gyms and barbershops are open 24 hours a day.

Samovar tea vendors claim to have Qatari customers, but they are too sporadic to start a trend.

However, according to Kuttipran, the tea enthusiast, many locations of a different company, House of Tea, have recently shifted toward samovar tea.

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