Persian Drinks: Chai, Sharbat and 13 More Names in Farsi

Short answer: Tea in Farsi is chây, or châyi in speech, and coffee is qahve. Persian drinks start with tea, served black in small glasses with sugar cubes on the side. Then come dugh, the salty yogurt drink you order with kebab, and sharbat, sweet cold syrups. Below: every drink name with script, and how to order.

If you spend a day with an Iranian family, you'll be offered tea more times than you can count. That makes tea vocabulary the most useful drinks vocabulary by far, so it gets the biggest section here. The rest is what you'll see on a café or restaurant menu, and what to say when someone pours.

For the drink with its own fan club, there's a whole post: my doogh recipe in Farsi.

Persian drinks at a glance

Notice how many drinks start with آب, water. Juice is âb-mive, "fruit water", and each fruit slots in: âb-portoqâl (orange), âb-e anâr (pomegranate). Once you know a fruit's name, you can usually order its juice. The same logic gives you گلاب (golâb), rosewater: "flower water". I go through more of these in the compound nouns guide.

Tea in Farsi: chây and everything around it

چای is the formal word and چایی is what people say at home. The word itself came along the Silk Road from Chinese, and the same root gave Russian, Hindi and Turkish their words for tea.

Iranian tea is black, brewed strong in a teapot on top of a samovar, and poured into small glasses called استکان (estekân), so you can see the colour. Sugar isn't stirred in. You hold a sugar cube between your teeth and sip through it, or you take nabât, saffron rock candy. My Persian tea ceremony post covers the whole ritual.

Saying if you like it por-rang or kam-rang is part of the ritual. And the verb is a small surprise: in Farsi you "eat" tea. Chây mikhoram means "I drink tea". The formal verb نوشیدن (nushidan) is mostly for writing.

Dugh: the yogurt drink

دوغ is yogurt thinned with water, salted, usually with dried mint, and often fizzy. On a menu it sits next to the kebabs for a reason. The glossary examples cover most of what you'll say about it:

• با کباب دوغ می‌خورم (bâ kabâb dugh mikhoram): "I drink doogh with kebab"
• دوغ خانگی بدون گاز (dugh-e khânegi bedun-e gâz): "homemade non-carbonated doogh"

Fizzy or flat is a real argument in Iranian households. Gâzdâr means carbonated and بی‌گاز (bi-gâz) means flat.

Sharbat and other cold drinks

شربت (sharbat) is a sweet syrup diluted with cold water and ice. My restaurant menu practice lists the usual flavours: rosewater, saffron and sour cherry. It's the drink of hot afternoons and of guests arriving in summer.

سکنجبین (sekanjabin) is a syrup of vinegar, sugar and mint, served the same way, and often with lettuce leaves for dipping. خاکشیر (khâkshir) is a drink of tiny seeds in sweet water, cooling and a bit unusual the first time.

Coffee in Farsi

Coffee is قهوه (qahve), borrowed from Arabic. A قهوه‌خونه (qahve-khune, spoken form of qahve-khâne) is literally a coffee house and is a traditional place to sit. City cafés, kâfe, serve espresso and the rest, and they've become a big part of young urban life, as my post on the café crackdown explains.

How to order drinks in Farsi

• یک دوغ سرد بده (yek dugh-e sard bede): "give me a cold doogh" (casual; add lotfan with a waiter)
• آب انار می‌خواهم (âb-e anâr mikhâham): "I want pomegranate juice" (spoken: âb anâr mikhâm)
• یک لیوان شیر می‌خواهم (yek livân shir mikhâham): "I want a glass of milk"
• یک لیوان آب‌پرتقال (yek livân âb-portoqâl): "a glass of orange juice"
• من بدون قند میخورم (man bedun-e qand mikhoram): "I take it without sugar"

When the host pours

At someone's home you don't order. Drinks are offered, and there's a script. Here's how it usually goes with tea:

That first refusal is part of تعارف, the dance of offering and declining. The house visit guide explains how many rounds to expect before you say yes.

Get it wrong and the worst that happens is a warm laugh and a story they’ll tell for years. Get it right — refuse the tea twice, accept on the third — and you’ll watch a face open up. You didn’t just speak Persian. You played the game.