Çaydanlık — stacked concentrate teapot

Brews a strong tea concentrate in an upper pot heated by the water boiling in a lower one, so every glass is diluted to the strength the guest asked for at the moment it is poured.

The lower kettle boils; its steam and radiant heat keep the upper pot hot without ever putting the leaf over direct flame. The upper pot holds a high-leaf concentrate. Service is a two-stream pour — concentrate to strength, then water from below to fill. The engineering idea is decoupling: brewing happens once, serving happens many times, and strength control moves out of the brew and into the pour, which is what lets one person serve continuous tea without a brew cycle between glasses. The failure is built into the same design. The concentrate sits over heat for its whole life, so it keeps extracting and keeps evaporating: it grows more tannic and more concentrated at the same time, and dilution corrects the second without touching the first. Stewed tea diluted is weak stewed tea. That is why the control on a çaydanlık is a refresh interval and a discard, never a top-up.

• Choose this model when tea is ordered continuously, glass by glass, all day — and reject it when tea is a specialty item. The çaydanlık is a black-tea machine. It exists to make strength a pouring decision, and that is precisely the wrong instrument for a green, white or oolong programme where the whole point is a controlled temperature and a controlled steep. A bar running both should run both: a concentrate pot for the volume tea, and a per-pot brew for the menu tea.
• Size the concentrate pot to the REFRESH INTERVAL, not to the day. This is the decision the whole item turns on. A pot sized for peak means that at every refresh you pour good tea down the drain — and a team that is throwing tea away will quietly stop refreshing on time, which converts a capacity decision into a quality failure. Brew what the next interval will actually sell, and brew again.
• Make the refresh a scheduled task with a timestamp, not a judgement. The concentrate degrades continuously and invisibly, and nobody tastes the drift because they taste it every hour. Put the brew time on the pot, put the refresh in the shift routine, and let the tracker carry it — the same discipline the batch base and the thermal server already get.
• Read the heat source as a consistency decision. A hob ring set by hand drifts with whoever adjusts it; a thermostatic base repeats. If the bar is training new staff regularly, the thermostatic version buys back more consistency than any change of leaf will.
• Buy glass for the concentrate pot if the team is inexperienced. Being able to see that the concentrate has gone too dark converts an expert judgement into something a first-week hire can act on, and it is the cheapest training aid in this category.
• Cost the hob ring before choosing stovetop. A ring occupied all service on a bar that also plates food is a genuine capacity loss, and it is never in the equipment comparison because it is not in the equipment price.
• Plan where the concentrate is discarded and where the leaf goes. A wet leaf mass is heavy, hot and awkward, and a station with no discard route grows a habit of tipping it into the sink, which is how a tea station blocks a drain.
• Confirm the electrical supply for an electric or samovar-style unit, and any gas connection for a stovetop, with a licensed professional; the local authority governs both. This site states no load, no phase and no gas requirement.