How to Prepare Your CoffeeKurdish Menengiç Coffee
Kurdish coffee contains no coffee at all — it is brewed from the roasted fruit of the wild terebinth tree, cooked slowly with milk until it foams. Known as qehweya kezwanê in Kurdish and menengiç kahvesi in Turkish, it has been made for more than a century across the southeast, in Diyarbakır, Adıyaman, Mardin, Batman, Siirt and Gaziantep, where the terebinth holds dry mountain ground that little else will. The autumn berries are sun-dried, slow-roasted and mashed into an oily, nutty paste, then spooned into the pot with milk rather than water. What comes out is caffeine-free, faintly sweet, unmistakably pistachio — and it settles in the cup exactly the way Turkish coffee does.
Ratio breakdown
Ingredients run from the top of the cup to the bottom; the last item is the bottom layer. Values are normalized to a true 100% stack.
What you need
- 1–2 heaped teaspoons per cup (~4 g)Terebinth grounds (menengiç)
- 1 coffee cup (~90 ml)Milk
- ½–1 teaspoon, to tasteSugar
Method notes
- Grind
- Fine and powdery like Turkish coffee — most often sold already mashed into a dark, oily paste rather than a dry powder
- Water temperature
- Low heat, brought only to the foam — never a hard boil
- Total time
- 8 min
Steps
Stir the grounds into cold milk
Terebinth paste is oily and clumps the moment it meets hot liquid, so it is worked into cold milk first — the same cold start Turkish coffee uses, for the same reason: an even suspension extracts evenly instead of scorching in lumps.
Dissolve the sugar before the heat goes on
Like every drink in the cezve family, the sweetness is decided before brewing, not stirred in after. Once the foam forms, stirring collapses it, so anything that needs dissolving has to be in the pot from the start.
Bring it up slowly over low heat
Milk scorches and curdles far more readily than water, and the terebinth's nutty aroma is volatile. Low, patient heat draws the flavour out and lets the foam build; a hard boil gives you a skin on top and a burnt note underneath.
Pull it off at the first rise, rest, then pour
The foam climbing the neck is the signal — beyond it the milk boils over and the drink turns flat. A minute off the heat lets the heaviest grounds drop so the pour comes out smooth, with the sediment left behind.
Tips
- Buy it as paste rather than powder — the jarred, oily form is how it is sold across Gaziantep and Diyarbakır, and it dissolves into milk far more willingly than a dry grind.
- Full-fat milk is what the tradition assumes — the fat carries the terebinth's pistachio character, and a lower-fat milk leaves the cup thin and faintly chalky.
Common mistakes
- Letting it boil — milk that reaches a rolling boil curdles at the edges and scorches on the base, and the nutty aroma the whole drink exists for is the first thing to go.
- Expecting a caffeine lift — terebinth is not a coffee plant and the drink has no caffeine at all, which is exactly why it is drunk late in the evening across the southeast.
FAQ
Is Kurdish coffee actually coffee?
No, and it never claimed to be a bean. It is brewed from the roasted fruit of the terebinth (Pistacia terebinthus), a wild relative of the pistachio that grows across the southeastern mountains, so it contains no caffeine whatsoever. It earns the name from how it is treated rather than what it is made of — roasted, ground, brewed in a cezve and served in a small cup with the grounds settling at the bottom, exactly like the coffee it sits beside.
Why is it also called menengiç coffee?
The two names belong to the two languages spoken where it is made. Kurdish calls it qehweya kezwanê after kezwan, the terebinth; Turkish calls it menengiç kahvesi, and Gaziantep holds a Turkish geographical-indication certificate under the name Gaziantep Menengiç Coffee. Kurdish writers have long argued that the Turkish label displaced the older Kurdish one, and the drink was in fact sold in France as chicorée au Kurde before the naming shifted. Both names describe the same pot.
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