Have you seen the latest tempest in the [salted] teapot? Recently, American chemist Michelle Francl had the audacity (!) to recommend a sprinkle of salt in your tea. Which prompted the Brits to charges of heresy. (Read story here.)

However, adding salt to tea is nothing new.

Chinese tea master Lu Yu, who wrote the Classic of Tea around 760 CE—that’s over 1200 years ago!—added salt when he boiled water to make tea. Although he cautioned against making the water too salty lest the tea also be too salty, he apparently used only a pinch of salt to about a quart of water (Barnes 2014:11). That amount is unlikely to bestow much, if any, saltiness to the tea.

When brewing loose tea leaves—rather than compressed tea bricks or ground tea—became the norm in China, salt was no longer added.

However, Tibetans never dispensed with the salt, using it still today to make both butter tea and a salty black tea. Similarly, the Nakhi, an ethnic group that lives mostly in China’s southern Yunnan Province, enjoy their own take on salt butter tea (Drinking Folk).

In addition, salt tea has long been consumed in Kashmir, where pretty much everyone drinks it, including children.

As with Tibetan and Nakhi tea, making the tea requires quite a process, one honed by tradition:

To prepare salt tea, people in Kashmir brew green tea leaves, mostly in the presence of baking soda . . . until a thick red-brown colored extract is obtained. During this process, and after partial evaporation of water, more water is added. . . . [P]eople dilute the final extract with water and add salt and milk at the end. The tea is repeatedly boiled in a vessel or in a charcoal fueled “samovar,” . . . before it is served. (Dar et al. 2015)

Ali (2022) notes that the per capita daily consumption of salt tea is as high as 84.5 ounces!

Green tea leaves are traditionally used as they apparently have the optimal polyphenols to work with the baking soda to give the tea a pink color. And note that this unique tea is called by various names (Ali 2022):

• noon chai (Kashmiri for pink-colored salted tea)
• sheer chai (Central Asian term for pink-colored salted tea)
• namkeen chai (salty tea)
• pink tea

As we’d expect, the high intake of a baking soda–salt drink has its own risks, including hypertension and esophageal and stomach cancer.

The practice of adding ingredients other than the customary cream and sugar has also long existed in western countries, although its practice may not have been widespread and the custom hasn’t carried over into today’s culture.

Writing about tea in 1890, I. L. Hauser cites Johnson’s Chemistry of Common Life, which

suggests that “a pinch of soda be put into the water along with the tea to dissolve the gluten and make the beverage more nutritious.”

Okay. . . . tea, sugar, cream, milk . . . are all gluten-free. . . .

But why salt?

Adding salt to anything enhances flavor.

But, perhaps more relevant to tea and coffee, salt can salvage an overly bitter cup. To see why this works, we have to look at our tongue.

When we eat salt (sodium chloride), the positively charged sodium and the negatively charged chloride ions slide down a channel, right into cells. There, they impact the cells’ electrical charge. This in turn notifies the brain, and we experience “saltiness” (Gritzer 2023).

At the same time, this process dampens how we perceive bitterness. Thus, whatever we’ve ingested seems less bitter to us. (You can try this out for yourself. For instance, if you find grapefruit unpleasantly bitter and sour, try sprinkling it with a bit of salt.)

Daniel Gritzer goes into more detail about all this (see his article), but he also points out how complicated the entire tasting process is. Still, the science supports Lu Yu’s pinch of salt when making tea if he meant to counteract tea’s bitterness, and it aligns with Michelle Francl’s recommendation.

But should you?

In the end, however, I’d argue that you shouldn’t ever need to add salt to tea, especially if you’ve brewed your own tea. When you use words to describe your cup of tea, “bitter” really shouldn’t be at the top of the list. The word’s not even on the tasting wheel!

If your tea is bitter, there may be several reasons for that. I’d suggest buying high-quality loose leaves—and then brewing them correctly (note that some teas are more forgiving than others). Very often, bitterness is the result of using poor-quality tea, using too many leaves, letting the leaves brew too long, or using water that is too hot for the leaves. Better to correct these parameters than to try fixing bad tea with the salt shaker.

And yet, and yet. Life is seldom optimal and often must be taken with a grain of salt.

When served a cup of subpar tea, a subtle sprinkle of salt may allow you to sip that bitter brew politely, with apparent relish. And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that.

Sources:
–Ali, M., “Optimization of Kashmiri green tea (noon chai) extractions using response surface methadology [sic],” master’s dissertation, Integral University, Lucknow, India, 2022.
–Cohen, L., “Tea with salt?,” CBS News, 1/27/24.
–Dar, N. A., et al., “Salt tea consumption and esophageal cancer,” International Journal of Cancer 136:E704–10. 2015.
–Drinking Folk, “Saltea: Adding a pinch to the porcelain cup,” accessed 2/27/24.
–Gritzer, D., “Flavor science,” Serious Eats, 2/27/23.
–Hauser, I. L., Tea: Its Origin, Cultivation, Manufacture and Use, Rand, McNally and Company, Chicago, 1890.