Do you drink tea or Coffee? If you are going to Sri Lanka on holiday and like milk with your tea be careful. We could not understand why hotel and restaurant staff kept on serving Ceylon tea with warm milk? The taste was not very pleasant.

Sri Lankan Milk, Milk Powder, Tea and Dangers

Being English we are used to having fresh cold milk with our hot tea. If you heat milk it has its own distinct taste that affects the taste of tea. Yes I know that when you put cold milk into hot tea it gets heated but it is not the same.

We would ask the waiting staff to take the hot milk away and bring back cold milk. We then found out that there are no dairy herds in Sri Lanka. The majority of their milk comes from New Zealand in the form of full cream milk powder. Water is boiled to make it safe before it is added to the powder, hence the reason that hot milk is served with tea.

By asking the staff to take it away and bring cold milk you are risking the waiters just using un-purified tap water to make your milk. That is not a very clever idea. My answer to this problem is just to drink the wonderful Sri Lankan Lion beer.

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