Chai Syrup and Chai Powder: How to Make One and Choose the Other

Use it to sweeten a concentrate, a plain cup of black tea, iced tea or a coffee, or in drinks and desserts. Some recipes steep tea in the syrup as well; the spices are what make it a chai syrup.

Spiced chai syrup

Ingredients

• 1 cup (240 ml) water
• 1 cup sugar (white, or brown or jaggery for a deeper flavor)
• 1 cinnamon stick
• 6 green cardamom pods, lightly crushed
• 4 cloves
• 1-inch piece of fresh ginger, sliced
• Optional: 2 teaspoons strong black tea, for a tea-flavored syrup

Method (total time about 35 minutes, plus cooling)

1. Put the water, sugar and spices in a small saucepan and stir over medium heat until the sugar dissolves.
2. Simmer gently for 10 minutes.
3. Take it off the heat. If you are using tea, add it now and steep for 5 minutes, then lift it out. Leave the spices to steep for 20 minutes in all.
4. Strain into a clean bottle, let it cool and refrigerate.
5. Use 1 to 2 teaspoons per cup of chai, or about 15 to 20 ml in a cold drink, and adjust to taste.

Why make your own

A homemade syrup holds only sugar, water and spice. Our colleague Meeta Sharma put the case against the bottled kind bluntly in 2015: “I have a deep aversion to packaged juice and ready-to-make syrups – it’s all sugar, artificial flavors, more sugar.”

It also lets you choose the sugar. Peter Keen, writing for us, found honey “by far the best” with chai, and brown sugar, maple syrup and cane sugar the sweeteners that best “preserve its natural and piquant flavors.” He also noted that cinnamon-heavy chais need less sugar to begin with.

How sweet should a chai syrup be?

For a lighter syrup, use less sugar. In our 2017 series of iced tea mocktails, the sugar syrup was made at 2:1 water to sugar, and 15 to 20 ml of it sweetened a glass built on 120 ml of tea concentrate.

Our other cold drinks show how small the right amount can be. A whiskey drink on our Kopi Chia iced tea used only 7 ml of brown sugar syrup to 120 ml of concentrate, and our Pomegranate Swirl used 20 ml of a concentrated sugar syrup against gin and tonic. Start with 15 ml in a glass and add more only after tasting.

When the sugar goes in matters too. A reader of our ginger chai story noticed that “the sweetness varies depending on when during the process you add sugar.” A syrup stirred into a finished cup sweetens it evenly and at once, so a little goes further than sugar boiled in the pan.

• Chai latte powder (instant chai, chai premix): A ready mix that usually contains tea in soluble form, spices and often milk powder and sugar. Many are heavy on sugar, with fillers such as maltodextrin and synthetic flavors. A good one should list real tea and real spices near the top of the ingredients.
• Chai masala powder: A dry blend of ground spices such as cardamom, ginger, cinnamon, clove and black pepper. It contains no tea at all; you add a pinch to tea as it simmers. See Chai spices and chai masala.
• “Tea powder” in India: In many Indian homes, “tea powder” or chai patti simply means CTC black tea, the small granules most everyday chai is made from. That is entirely real tea.

Tea 101 has long drawn the same line: chai lattes “are often made with either a soluble powder or a syrup imitating a chai flavor,” and are “a lot sweeter than chai tea.”

Here is what “read the label” looks like in practice. Peter Keen quoted one café chai concentrate’s ingredients for us: “sugar, dried whole milk, instant black tea, maltodextrin, salt and stevia sweetener.” Sugar comes first, so there is more of it than of anything else, and the tea is instant.

Our own Instant Chai Latte Mix was made in answer to the first problem. Teabox launched it in February 2026 with no added sugar, no artificial flavoring and real spices.

The product page describes it as made with real Assam tea and real ingredients, with no fillers, and ready in seconds. The assorted pack takes its cues from five of our chais: Kadak, Assam Masala, Kolkata Street, a saffron and rose chai, and a cardamom chai, two sachets of each in the pack of ten.

How to make it, and what to know

• Preparation: Tear open one sachet, add 100 ml of hot water and stir. Use water, not milk, because the dairy is already in the mix.
• Form: Premix granules, with the tea as a tea extract, ground spices such as cardamom, ginger, clove, cinnamon and black pepper, and natural cardamom, ginger, rose and saffron flavors.
• Milk: The mix contains milk solids, so it is not dairy-free or vegan.
• Sugar: There is no added sugar, but it is not sugar-free: the sugar on the label comes from the lactose in the dairy whitener.
• Caffeine: Similar to a regular cup of chai, which Tea 101 puts at about the same as a cup of black tea, roughly 50 mg, varying with the tea and the serving.
• Storage: Keep the sachets dry. The pack of ten weighs 140 g, about 14 g a sachet.