Builders, Bawarka and tea with too much milk

I got asked to talk about tea drinking in Britain on Polish breakfast TV programme Pytanie na Śniadanie recently. The producers love a foreigner’s angle. And they are great tea drinkers, the Poles,who have taken up mata and yerba trends. But mostly, they opt for taking their tea black with rindless lemon.

I got asked to talk about tea drinking in Britain on Polish breakfast TV programme Pytanie na Śniadanie recently. The producers love a foreigner’s angle. And they are great tea drinkers, the Poles, having taken up matcha and yerba mate trends. But mostly, they opt for taking their tea black with rindless lemon.

It’s tasty every now and then, but in the morning, for elevenses or after lunch, I crave builders’ tea,” as we would call it. Hot, and strong. Enough milk to make it caramel-coloured but not too much definitely not too much. Some heap in sugar. I don’t.

“We call that bawarka,” said my editor, Piotr.  My mother gave it to me that way as a child. Also good for helping lactation”

Poles have been telling me this for 30 years, and I politely smile. But I decided the time was right to do a deeper dive into the origins of bawarka. Far from the bucolic image of a yodelling alpine wet nurse balancing a suckling baby in one hand and 8 flagons of Munchen Hell in the other, online sources point to a drink favoured by 17th-century Bavarian noblemen visiting Paris. And the Poles borrowed “Bavaroise” from the French in the 18th Century, when Gallic ways were à la mode. The so-called “Bavarian” was served with milk or fern syrup (not a regular item in most larders, even then) and egg yolk.

Who drinks it these days? “I’ve never heard about it,” Marine, a French friend, told me. “We don’t drink tea that way in France currently. Even English tea with milk is not popular.”
“I have never heard of anyone in Bavaria drinking that nowadays,” Carolina Zawada, a German communications expert and podcaster in Warsaw attested. “But, we do say milk in your tea is good for breastfeeding.”

Maybe it is time for rebranding Bawarka? “Since the Poles redubbed Russian dumplings as Ukrainian after Putin’s full-scale invasion, why not call tea with milk “Brytyjka, as we are the ones who drink it? I asked Carolina. “Makes sense,” she replied, with a winking emoji.

Visiting The People’s Republic of Poland in the 1980’s, you got served granulated tea floating ineffictively in a fragile glass of boiling water – undrinkable without an asbestos glove. By the nineties the glass came with a teabag sachet.

Those bleak days are long gone. Fellow tea enthusiasts Łódż Vietnamese restauratuer Lilly Ten and Mexican influencer Riki Sanmar shared the secrets of their national brews with our TV hosts. And be it hibiscus and cinamon or Vietnamese green tea, it could all be reproduced easily in the Warsaw studio.

“In the winter our shop’s best sellers are Orange and Ginger, Orange Spice, Evening by the Fireplace, White Fujian and Winter Magic.” Ewa Klara of Tea&Tea told me. We get a lot of foreigners, but not many British people, except for one nice chap comes in every so often and practices his Polish on us.”

Before the show I went around Mokotów district to see how hard it would be to find a decent cuppa, British style. I knew would have something to moan about, British style. You can’t order tea with milk at the self-serve counters of my local fast food joints, but the staff were helpful. One fried chicken giant’s staffer added the cold milk directly to a cup of hot water and handed me a sachet of earl grey. A for effort, D for aesthetics.One savvy burger restaurant waitress got an A for asking “hot or cold?” I got a perfectly adequate ketchup-sized serving. 

For cafes I thought I would up the challenge, by just asking for “tea with milk”. In one German cafe they handed me a tea bag, a glass cup of hot water and a wasteful ⅓ of a pint of hot milk on the side. 

Meanwhile, in a British-owned cafe franchise, where I had high hopes of an ideal cuppa, instead I got half a mug with a strainer dangling in it, which the server then filled to the brim with boiled milk. Bawarka, Polish style. I almost felt my nipples swell at the thought of it.