How India Drinks Tea: Chai, Cutting, Kahwa and How to Make Indian Tea

Our own tour of the country goes like this: on a Srinagar houseboat the chaiwallah asks, “noon or kahwa?”; at a Punjab dhaba the chai is spicy; Bombay takes cutting chai breaks; Kolkata pours it into kulhad clay cups; Assam steeps its “quintessential malts”; and in Darjeeling you know you have arrived when you are “engulfed in the mist.”

Mumbai and Kashmir

In Mumbai, “just the word cutting itself means chai,” and many stalls keep the tea and the milk in separate pots so customers can order it stronger or milkier: paani kam doodh, less water and more milk, or the reverse. Kashmiri kahwa, by contrast, is made with green tea and is a celebratory drink, often served at brunch.

In the valley, kahwa is poured from the samovar into a small brass cup called a khos, and alongside it Kashmiris drink dodh and mith chai as well as the pink noon, or sheer, chai.

The northeast and the Nilgiris

In Assam, home of the strongest tea in India, many households drink it lightest. Lal cha is “a light brew where the tea leaf is added to hot water and poured out immediately without adding milk,” as Julie Kagti described it for our blog. The novelist Shona Patel, a planter’s daughter who grew up on an Assam estate, told us she drinks “several cups of ultra-strong Assam (CTC) tea” while she writes each morning. Assam even cooks the small white tea flowers, like a sabzi.

Meghalaya, which now grows fine tea of its own, has a huge tea-drinking culture, but of boiled milk tea with sugar. The writer Anjum Hasan told us Shillong was “a Brooke Bond culture,” and that her parents “only drink CTC… The idea of brewing their tea, rather than boiling it, is quite alien to them.” In the Nilgiris, Nilgiri tea comes with Coonoor’s Varkey biscuits, including the “tea Varkeys” made for dunking.

Read more in What is chai?, the regional styles in Types of chai in India, and the Kashmiri green tea in Kashmiri kahwa.

India grows some of the world’s finest teas, but at home “what the population best enjoys is chai, a sweetened milky tea made from CTC tea.” Most of Darjeeling’s tea still goes to Europe, the United States and Japan, “leaving much of our own population in India unaware of the wide variety of teas the region has to offer,” as our own notes on single-estate tea put it.

For generations the best leaf went abroad. As Mrityunjay Jalan, then the young director of Chota Tingrai in Assam, told our blog in 2015: “Traditional tea companies have always exported the best teas and the leftovers were dumped here. It’s time to offer Indians a quality product.” Our founder put it more bluntly, quoting the writer Vir Sanghvi: “No matter how much tea it produces, India does not drink real tea itself.”

That is changing. More Indians now buy single-estate Darjeeling and whole-leaf Assam to drink plain, and good whole leaf makes better chai too. As one of our posts asked, why not celebrate the terroir of India’s tea estates the way we appreciate the terroir of wine?

The two methods in this part suit different teas: CTC and strong Assams can take boiling, while delicate hill teas are spoiled by it.

This is the method our team shared with a reader who had “been searching for a good chai recipe for years.”

You will need ¾ cup (about 180 ml) water, 1 full teaspoon CTC black tea or a strong, full-bodied Assam leaf, about ½ cup (120 ml) full-cream milk, and sugar, to taste. If you like, add 2 crushed green cardamom pods, ½ teaspoon grated fresh ginger or an inch of cinnamon stick.

1. Boil the tea. Bring the water to a boil with the tea, and any spices, and let it boil for a good 2 minutes, until the liquor is dark brown.
2. Add milk and sugar. Pour in the milk and add sugar to taste. Adding the milk after the tea has boiled lets you control how strong or milky the chai is.
3. Simmer. Let it come to a boil again, and once more after that, for about 2 minutes, until it “looks like toffee, well, almost.”
4. Strain and serve. Strain into a cup and drink it hot.

For our own Kadak Chai we buy premium CTCs from Assam gardens. For the full masala version, with spice ratios, see How to make masala chai at home.

Use about 2 to 2.5 g of leaf, roughly a heaped teaspoon, for a 250 ml (8 oz) cup, and adjust the water and time to the tea:

Why 2.5 grams

The 2.5 g measure comes from the estates’ own tasting rooms. Darjeeling tasters weigh each sample against an old 25-paisa coin, which weighs exactly 2.5 g, “the exact amount of tea required for sampling and arriving at an appropriate sale price.” At Goomtee the coin dates from 1974, Namring uses a Pakistani quarter-rupee, and the habit goes back to the British managers before 1947.

Our own buyers start from the same cup. When a sample comes in, our tea buyer Ravi Kothari explained, they check “moisture of the tea sample, the percentage of flakes in tea, and the flavor profiles.” Brewing at home the same way, with the same weight of leaf each time, is the easiest way to compare two teas fairly.

When a cup goes wrong

If a tea tastes bitter, the water was too hot or it steeped too long; for more strength, add leaf rather than time. Darjeeling has its own guide: How to brew Darjeeling tea.