Luxury in a Glass: 5 Rare Traditional Drinks From Around the World

Five beverages that predate the wine list by centuries and have been waiting for the world to catch up.

Sometime in the sixteenth century, when Hernan Cortes sat at the court of Moctezuma and watched a cold, frothed drink made from ground cacao, water, chili, and vanilla being poured repeatedly between vessels from a height to produce its foam, he found it bitter and strange and largely unimpressive. He added sugar, applied heat, called it chocolate, and carried it back to Europe, where it became something considerably simpler than what it had been. The civilization he encountered had been drinking it for two thousand years. It had taken them that long to understand it properly.

This is, in miniature, the history of how the West has consistently related to the drinking cultures of the rest of the world. It encounters something ancient and complex, finds it unfamiliar, adjusts it toward comfort and familiarity, and then congratulates itself on the discovery. The five beverages that follow have been waiting at various points in history for someone to stop altering them. They are not wellness products, and they are not alternatives to alcohol. They are complete civilizations in a glass, each one the product of more accumulated knowledge and more patient human labor than almost any luxury object the contemporary market has thought to take seriously.

Mitti Attar in Water, Kannauj, India

In early June, before the monsoon breaks over the Gangetic plain of Uttar Pradesh, the earth is so dry that it has become a specific kind of silence. When the first rain falls on that earth, something rises from it—mineral, warm, geological, with no equivalent in any flavor vocabulary built for temperate climates. In Kannauj, the perfume capital of India, they have been capturing that moment in a bottle for over four hundred years.

Mitti attar begins with Gangetic alluvial clay, baked in wood-fired kilns until it is dry and porous and concentrated with the mineral signature of that specific landscape. The baked clay goes into copper degs—large distillation pots sealed with clay and cotton—and hydrodistilled with water over fires of wood and cow dung whose temperature the craftsmen regulate entirely by observation and touch, as their fathers did and their fathers before them. The vapor travels through bamboo pipes into a receiving vessel called a bhapka, which holds aged sandalwood oil. The sandalwood absorbs and holds the distillate. The process takes days. The aging takes months.

The Mughal courts dissolved mitti attar in water and drank it, not as medicine, not as ritual, but as pleasure. One drop in a glass of cool water places you immediately inside the experience of rain on dry earth, regardless of where you are or what season surrounds you. The flavor sits outside every category that conventional beverage criticism was built to address. It is not sweet, not bitter, and not sour. It is geological. It is the taste of a specific landscape at a specific moment, preserved and carried forward by people who understood that some experiences are worth the labor of capturing.

The families in Kannauj who still work the traditional degh-bhapka method are becoming fewer. Gas-powered alternatives are faster and cheaper and produce something that most noses cannot distinguish from the original. Finding genuinely traditional mitti attar requires knowing who to ask and being prepared to pay what the labor is actually worth. That price is, by any measure, modest relative to what the knowledge behind it has cost to preserve.

Ceremonial Matcha, Uji, Japan

The preparation of a bowl of ceremonial matcha in the Japanese tea tradition takes approximately forty-five minutes. The guest drinks it in three and a half sips. That ratio of forty-five minutes of preparation to three and a half sips of consumption is not inefficiency. It is a philosophical position about what drinking is for.

Uji, south of Kyoto along the river of the same name, has been producing the finest green tea in Japan since the twelfth century, when the monk Eisai returned from China with seeds and the knowledge of how to cultivate them. The terroir of Uji, clay soil, morning mists from the river, and a microclimate of specific precision produce a leaf with concentrations of L-theanine, the amino acid responsible for the particular quality of calm alertness that distinguishes fine matcha from every imitation of it, that no other growing region has managed to replicate at the same level.

The best ceremonial grade matcha comes from specific tea plants—Okumidori, Samidori, and Uji Hikari—that are grown in the shade under special canopies for three to four weeks before they are harvested, which makes the plants produce more chlorophyll and amino acids in their leaves. The first harvest of late April and early May, called Ichibancha, produces the most prized leaves. These are steamed immediately after picking, dried, stripped of stems and veins to produce tencha, and stone-ground at temperatures maintained below twenty-five degrees Celsius because heat damages the amino acids and compromises everything into a powder so fine that one hour of milling produces thirty grams.

Fewer than a dozen families in Uji still produce matcha at this level of specificity. A bowl prepared correctly, with water heated to seventy degrees in a warmed ceramic vessel and whisked in a W-shaped motion until the foam is uniform and dense, is experienced in the throat and chest as much as on the tongue. The calm that follows is not metaphorical. The L-theanine is real, the effect is measurable, and the experience of drinking something made with this degree of accumulated care is something that reorganizes, quietly and permanently, your understanding of what a beverage can communicate.

Tepache, Oaxaca, Mexico

Long before the Spanish arrived with their distillation equipment and their sugar, the indigenous peoples of Mesoamerica had been fermenting pineapple rinds in clay vessels with piloncillo and cinnamon and cloves for longer than anyone has determined with certainty. The result—tepache—is one of the oldest continuously produced fermented beverages in the Americas. Mildly probiotic, gently effervescent, with a complexity that shifts depending on the pineapple variety, the mineral content of the local water, the temperature and duration of fermentation, and the specific blend of spices used.

In its finest form, produced by families in Oaxaca and the Valley of Mexico who have been making it the same way for generations, tepache bears no resemblance to the pasteurized approximations that have recently appeared in health food stores and wellness cafes. Pasteurization kills the living cultures that give genuine tepache its particular quality of aliveness on the palate, a slight tang that is not exactly sourness but something closer to the sensation of fermentation itself, the sense that what you are drinking is still in the process of becoming what it is. A glass of properly made tepache, consumed within two to three days of preparation, has never been fully still and will not survive long enough to become so.

The Oaxacan producers who take tepache most seriously source their pineapples from specific family farms in the tropical lowlands, where varieties unavailable commercially, with dramatically higher sugar content and more complex aromatic compounds, are grown specifically for fermentation. The rinds and cores are used whole. Fermentation time is measured not in hours but in sensory observation—color, aroma, the behavior of the surface, and the particular sound the liquid makes when disturbed. This knowledge is not written down anywhere. It lives in the hands and the noses of the people who have been doing it their entire lives, and it cannot be approximated by anyone who has not.

Sikhye, Korea

Every significant Korean meal ends with sikhye. It arrives cold and mildly sweet, with a few grains of cooked rice floating on its surface and occasionally a slice of persimmon. It serves as a digestive aid, a conclusion to the meal, and a punctuation mark—a signal that the meal is complete, the body has received what it needed, and stillness is now appropriate.

The finest sikhye is made with rice varieties specific to particular Korean regions, malted barley prepared through a process requiring precise temperature control over an extended period, and spring water whose mineral content the most experienced producers can taste and adjust for. Fermentation takes between eight and twelve hours at a specific temperature that allows the enzymes in the malt to convert the starches in the rice into maltose—a sugar with a flavor profile considerably more subtle than refined sugar, carrying what the Korean vocabulary of taste calls "danseok," the sweetness of grains, a quality that has no direct equivalent in European flavor language.

The result, when made correctly, is barely sweet and faintly alive, gently effervescent from the activity of its living cultures, with a depth that reveals itself across multiple sips rather than announcing itself immediately. Buddhist temple kitchens in Korea have been producing sikhye using essentially the same method for over a thousand years. The temple versions, made with particular attention to water quality, rice variety, and the season of production, are considered by Korean food scholars to be among the most refined fermented beverage traditions in any culture. They are not exported. They are not commercially available. They exist in the kitchens of specific temples and in the homes of families who learned to make them properly, and they are drunk in the context of meals that understand exactly what a beverage is for.

Drinking Chocolate, Sava Region, Madagascar, and Oaxaca, Mexico

What Cortes encountered at the court of Moctezuma and found unimpressive has, in the hands of a small number of serious producers in Madagascar and Oaxaca, returned to something the sixteenth-century Aztec court would have recognized as its own. Single-origin drinking chocolate made from Criollo and Trinitario cacao beans grown in Madagascar's Sava region—stone-ground without added sugar or emulsifiers, mixed with water at seventy degrees, and whisked to the consistency of cream—is a beverage of such density of flavor that one hundred and twenty milliliters is entirely sufficient. The bitterness is not harsh but structural, the way the bitterness of a great espresso is structural, a framework that holds complexity rather than an obstacle to pleasure. The flavor changes as it cools. It is worth paying attention to both temperatures.

In Oaxaca, the tradition of tejate—a pre-Columbian drink made from ground cacao, maize, the seeds of the mamey sapote fruit, and rosita de cacao, a flower that grows only in this region and contributes a flavor with no equivalent anywhere in the European food vocabulary—is produced by a small number of women in the markets of Oaxaca City and surrounding villages who have been making it the same way for generations. It is mixed by hand, cold, and worked until it produces a thick white foam served on top of the darker liquid below. The technique of producing that foam is not taught in any culinary school. The knowledge of this technique is passed among women who have been observing and learning since childhood, reflecting how valuable knowledge has traditionally been shared in the world—not through institutions, but through attention, proximity, and time.

What Is Actually at Stake

Each of the five beverages in this feature is, in its finest form, facing some version of the same pressure. The degh-bhapka families of Kannauj are fewer than they were a generation ago. The stone mills of Uji run for fewer hours each year. The women who make tejate in the markets of Oaxaca are not young. The Buddhist temple kitchens that produce the most refined sikhye do not advertise. The cacao farmers of the Sava region sell to whoever offers the best price that season, which is not always the person who will do the most with what they have grown.

None of this is inevitable. It is simply what happens when the world ignores the important things.

The most honest definition of luxury is not what something costs. Luxury is what it would cost to replace something if it were gone—and whether it could even be replaced. By that definition, a bowl of properly made sikhye from a Korean temple kitchen, or a glass of water holding one drop of traditionally distilled mitti attar, or a cup of tejate mixed by hand in an Oaxacan market at seven in the morning, is among the most luxurious things available to anyone on earth right now.

The question is simply whether you know to ask for it.

(Style Essentials covers beverage culture on entirely independent editorial terms.)