How to Make Chai Concentrate at Home: Two Teabox Recipes

This is our recipe as we first published it: “Start with the concentrate. Take 5 tsp of Ember Spice Chai in a pot. Steep it with 400ml hot water for 10 minutes. Strain out the liquor.”

Teabox chai concentrate (from a chai blend)

Ingredients

• 5 teaspoons loose-leaf masala chai blend (or a strong Assam black tea plus your own spices, see below)
• 400 ml (about 1⅔ cups) water, just off the boil

Method (total time about 15 minutes)

1. Put the chai blend in a pot or heatproof jug.
2. Pour over the hot water and leave it to steep for 10 minutes.
3. Strain out the leaf and spices through a fine strainer, pressing gently on the leaf.
4. Let the concentrate cool, then pour it into a clean glass jar or bottle, seal it and refrigerate.
5. To serve, use 80 ml of concentrate per mug, sweetened to taste and topped with hot milk (see Lattes and iced chai).

Use the water hot. Tea 101 gives 95–100°C for chai, the same as for an Assam black tea. Cooler water pulls less color and body from the leaf, and a concentrate needs all of both to stand up to the milk.

Which chai blend to use

Ember Spice Chai, the blend in the original post, is no longer in our range. It appeared in our Caribou Sky gift box in December 2019. Any loose-leaf masala chai works the same way.

Spicier blends such as our Assam Masala Chai, a strong Assam tea blended with cinnamon, black pepper, cardamom, clove and ginger, give the most chai-like result. Avishek, of our procurement team, reads it in three stages: ginger first, “rendering a warm feeling,” then cinnamon and clove, and a finish of cardamom and black pepper. With milk, he notes, “it is impressively dense, full-bodied and sweet,” which is exactly what a latte base needs.

For a more aromatic concentrate, try Kolkata Street Chai. In Avishek’s notes ginger and nutmeg come first, cardamom in the middle and saffron at the edges, and “a dash of milk brings out the flavors even more.” Use a little less milk with it than with Assam Masala.

Our Chai Tea Gift Box holds six regional blends if you want to find the one you like best in a latte.

If you would rather start from tea leaves and whole spices, simmer them. This is the base from our Summer Iced Chai recipe, first published on the Teabox blog in 2015. It makes a smaller, chai-shop style decoction for two glasses.

Its writer, Meeta Sharma of our team, found the idea by accident, when “my hot cup of masala chai cooled in an air-conditioned room.” The full story is in Forgive Me Chai, It’s Summer (Iced Chai Recipe).

• 2 teaspoons Assam loose-leaf black tea
• 2 cups water
• ½-inch piece of cinnamon stick
• ½-inch piece of fresh ginger, grated or crushed
• 3 to 4 green cardamom pods, seeds only
• ¼ teaspoon fennel seeds
• Sugar or honey, to taste

1. Bring the water to a boil in a medium saucepan.
2. Add the tea and all the spices and simmer for about 4 minutes.
3. Turn off the heat and let it cool. Strain, sweeten if you like, and pour into a jug or flask.
4. Chill for at least 2 hours before using.

Make the spice mix your own

Every family has its own version. “Moms across the country have always thrown spices into the chai. Everyone has her own secret recipe for the kadak masala chai,” said Shruti, our tea blender in Siliguri in 2015, who sampled 40 to 45 teas a week.

One of our writers remembers her mother making the spices into a concentrate of their own. She brewed a pot of regular chai with a little less milk, made “a fiery concentrate of spices” on the side from ginger, pepper, fennel, cinnamon and cardamom, and added it “just as the tea would come to a boil.” A jar of simmered, strained spice water works the same way: add a spoonful to any strong tea.

Match the leaf to the spice. Tea 101 suggests a small CTC grade such as BP (Broken Pekoe) with small spices like cardamom, and a larger grade such as BOPSM (Broken Orange Pekoe Souchong Mixed) when the spices are big and chunky, like star anise.

For the spices themselves, and how to grind your own chai masala, see Chai spices and chai masala.

That is why Indian chai is built on Assam tea: it gives body, color and a malty sweetness that milk softens rather than hides. Everyday Indian chai is mostly made with CTC Assam, whose small granules color the water fast; whole-leaf orthodox Assam gives a smoother, rounder concentrate if you steep it the full time. The difference is explained in Orthodox vs CTC tea, and the best leaves for milk are covered in Assam tea for milk tea.

Grade matters as much as origin. Our chai blends use a mix of BP (Broken Pekoe) and BP1 (Broken Pekoe 1), because “the smaller grain size allows for a quicker and more robust infusion.” In a 10-minute steep, small grains give up their strength fully, so the concentrate comes out dark and even.

Single-estate Assam for a home-spiced concentrate

Tea 101 adds that “most Assam black teas, especially the summer black teas,” work with milk, as do most breakfast teas. For a single-estate base, a summer Assam is ideal.

Halmari Summer Black is full-bodied and creamy, with malt, date and raisin; Halmari is a 374-hectare garden at Moran in Dibrugarh. Singlijan Summer Black, from a 271-hectare estate also in Dibrugarh, brings a striking malty depth. Add your own spices in the pot, using the whole-spice version above.

Is fine whole leaf worth it under milk and sugar? Peter Keen, writing for us, asked the same question of chais made with high-grade whole-leaf Assam: “If you are adding plenty of sweetener and milk, then probably not.” Save the single estates for a lightly sweetened concentrate, where their fruit can show.

Strength, not time

If your concentrate tastes thin, add more leaf next time rather than steeping longer. A longer steep pulls out more astringency along with the strength, and that dryness gets sharper as the concentrate sits in the fridge.