Assam Tea for Milk Tea and Bubble Tea: Which Assam Black Tea to Use, How Strong to Brew It, and an Assam Milk Tea Recipe

Milk softens tea and mutes its aroma, so the tea underneath has to be strong to begin with. Peter Keen, writing for our blog, suggested thinking of Assams as “English Breakfasts with attitude,” best summed up in one word: strong.

That strength comes from the plant and the place. Assam’s gardens lie on the hot, humid, low-lying plain of the Brahmaputra valley, and its native large-leafed tea plant, Camellia sinensis var. assamica, makes bold, dark, malty black tea. Tasters describe a good Assam as brisk and full-bodied, with a sweetness that recalls dates, raisins or cocoa. Milk rounds off the briskness and leaves the malt. More on the region in Assam tea.

It is no accident that Assam ended up in so many milk teas. “The bulk of the world’s breakfast teas are made with Assam’s teas,” as our buying team wrote from Dibrugarh in June 2015, and we have long described Assam as the single largest tea-producing region in the world. Breakfast teas are the ones people drink with milk. That is why Assam black tea for milk tea is such a common default.

Our 2017 buying guide is blunt about who Assam is for: “If you are a strong tea, milk-and-sugar habitué, the bigger the Assam the better.” For a reader who actively prefers milk and sugar, Keen adds, “a good-quality loose-leaf broken Assam is a more than satisfactory choice.”

Our tasting notes for Assam Masala Chai sum up the chemistry in one line: “Black tea offers briskness and astringency to the infusion, and takes to the addition of milk effortlessly.”

Avishek, of our procurement team, found the same when he hosted a chai tasting in 2021: with the addition of milk, the Assam blend is “impressively dense, full-bodied and sweet.”

Not every tea wants milk. A Darjeeling first flush or a delicate green tea is spoiled by it, because its flavor is all in the aroma. Whether you add milk at all is, in the end, personal. As the tea writer Ian Bersten put it on our blog: “make it the way you like and drink it the way you like.”

Both are black tea from the same bushes; the difference is how the leaf is made.

CTC: made for milk

CTC stands for crush, tear, curl (sometimes cut, tear, curl). The leaf passes through rollers with sharp teeth that turn it into small, hard, even pellets. “Assam is all about CTC!” as we once put it.

Tea 101 describes the result as a strong, dark liquor with a distinctly astringent edge, and notes that CTC “accommodates the addition of condiments like milk and lemon far better than orthodox teas.” As we like to put it, CTC is the method “that gives you that strong kadak cup of chai we all love.”

The reason is size. “The smaller the leaf, the quicker the tea releases its flavor and the harsher it will be,” Keen wrote, and “there is no whole-leaf CTC.” In a plain cup that harshness is a fault; under milk and sugar it becomes body. He also noted that almost all Assam tea is now CTC, made for tea bags and blends.

Good CTC is still a craft. When our team visited Halmari in 2016, the estate had just sold CTC at the highest price ever, and it kept its plucking rounds to five or six days so the leaf was always taken young.

Orthodox: smoother with a splash

Orthodox Assam is rolled to keep the leaf whole or in large pieces. It gives up its flavor more slowly and tastes sweeter, rounder and more complex, with less bite. A golden-tipped second flush Assam with a little milk is rich, malty and smooth; the same tea boiled hard for chai would be a waste.

On a label, Keen advises ignoring the first letters and reading the ending: FOP means flowery whole leaf, BOP broken leaf. Our buying guide put the choice simply: plain and strong, choose a broken-leaf Assam; more complex or softer, choose whole leaf. More in Orthodox vs CTC tea and, on reading the letters on a label, Tea grades explained.

Make it stronger with more leaf, not a longer steep, which adds bitterness faster than flavor.

For a plain Assam, the standard is 2 to 2.5 g of leaf (a heaped teaspoon) per 250 ml cup, with water just off the boil, for 4 to 5 minutes. Milk dilutes the tea and softens it, so for milk tea we start from double that amount of leaf.

Our product pages point the same way. For Kadak Chai, which is made to be drunk with milk and sugar, they give one teaspoon (about 2.5 g) for a 150 ml cup at 95 to 100°C for 5 minutes. That works out at about 4.2 g per 250 ml, right inside our milk-tea range.

For milk, our old Tea 101 chai guide suggests a ratio of two parts water to one part milk, adjusted to taste. Full-fat milk gives the creamiest cup; evaporated and condensed milk give the thick, sweet body of Southeast Asian and Hong Kong milk teas. Home cooks go much further: one of our writers grew up on her mother’s chai of “one part water, two parts milk, a heap of tea leaves and just one short spoon of sugar.”

Taste the tea before the milk goes in: if it already seems thin, no amount of milk will fix it. For iced drinks, allow for the ice, which is why bubble tea shops brew so strong. The general method, and why water temperature matters, is in our parent guide, How to brew loose leaf tea.

And milk first or last? Our blog’s verdict: “It would be a brave person who would bet money that they can detect whether the milk has been put in first or last.” For steeped tea, adding it last lets you judge the strength first.