What Is Chai? Masala Chai, Chai Tea and Chai vs Tea Explained

The word simply means tea, and it comes from cha, the Chinese word for the drink. Ask for chai anywhere in India and this is the cup you will be given. Our own glossary puts it in one line: “A preparation of black tea with milk, the most common way of consuming tea in India.” Our old FAQ was shorter still: chai is “tea made in the Indian style, CTC cooked in milk.”

The key word is simmered. You do not steep chai the way you steep a loose leaf black tea. You boil the tea in water, add milk and keep it at a medium to high heat for a few minutes, so that the tannic strength of the tea and the richness of the milk come together. “You do not steep chai, you brew it,” as one of our writers put it.

So what is chai made of? At its simplest, four things: tea, water, milk and sugar. The tea is almost always a strong, dark black tea, usually from Assam and usually CTC, the small, round granules that brew fast and give plenty of color and body. A light, aromatic tea like a Darjeeling has too thin a body for chai; milk and sugar would swamp it. Spices are optional; when they go in, the drink is masala chai. See Orthodox vs CTC tea for why the granules suit chai, and Assam tea for the region most chai comes from.

That is the odd thing about India and tea. As our old Tea 101 put it, the country “produces some of the world’s best teas from Darjeeling, Assam, the Nilgiris and Kangra but what the population best enjoys is chai, a sweetened milky tea made from CTC tea.”

Chai every day, and at our office

Chai is drunk everywhere in India: at home first thing in the morning, at roadside stalls, on railway platforms, in offices and whenever guests arrive. Avishek, of our procurement team, opened a chai tasting we hosted in 2021 by saying that “the style of preparation of chai varies distinctly from the north to the south and east to west. Every region in this vast country of ours has its own special chai.”

Our founder, Kausshal Dugarr, once listed “the perfect cup of chai,” missed through seven years of living in Singapore, as one more reason for coming back to India.

In Siliguri, where our teas are tasted and selected, most of our team stopped every day for a cup of Assam CTC chai from Joy-da, the chaiwallah on the ground floor of our office, as we wrote in 2015. Joy-da grew up in Sonarpur near Siliguri, where his father ran a sweet stall. His first job was in a bar, and when it shut he became a chaiwallah, 30 years before we wrote about him. Asked by a reader what made his chai so good, our editor answered that it was “the combination of his chai, the familiarity of his constant presence and a reason to stop for a chat and chai no matter how busy we are.”

A well-made cup is a balance: the tea should still come through the milk, and the spices should lift it rather than bury it. Our tasters judge a chai the way they judge a single-estate tea, by its top note, middle note and finish, and they taste a great many: in 2022 Avishek reckoned that, counting all the chai samplings, the team had tasted “closer to 24,678 cups” that year.

Our founder’s shortest version: “Please repeat after me: Tea ≠ Chai.”

Tea and chai

The difference between tea and chai is mostly in the leaf and the method. In broad terms, tea is made from loose leaves and drunk plain or with a little milk, while almost all chais use a strong CTC base, balanced with milk and lifted with spices. As more Indians drink green, white and single-estate teas, “tea” has become the broader word and “chai” the specific one.

It is still one plant. All teas, black, white, oolong, green and CTC, come from the same tea plant, a fact that almost always surprises people. The writer Jeff Koehler, who drank chai on the road in India for years, told us what changed when he finally tasted a Darjeeling plain: “no sugar, no milk, no lemon, no cardamom or ginger, no black pepper. Just tea. It had poise rather than the bounce of chai: patience over velocity, soft-spoken rather than brash.”

Chai tea

“Chai tea,” then, really means “tea tea.” Indians have called us out more than once for using the phrase in our ads; we use it because that is how the drink has become known around the world, and we are happy to see it reach so many places. Inside India, just say chai.

Peter Keen made the same point on our blog: “‘Chai’ is Hindi for tea, so chai tea is a redundancy.”

Chai latte

A chai latte is different again. Latte is Italian for milk, and a café latte is espresso with milk, a cousin of the French grand crème and the German Milchkaffee. A café chai latte is usually made by pouring a tea infusion, or a chai syrup or powder, into hot frothed milk, which makes it sweeter and milder than chai. Our own recipe card calls it “an adapted version of authentic Masala Chai from India.”

To an Indian, pouring tea into milk instead of boiling them together is quite unheard of. Many chai lattes in coffee shops start from “pre-brewed concentrates that are heavily pre-sweetened,” as Peter Keen noted in a draft for us. More in our Chai latte guide.

There is no single recipe. For every region of India, and almost every family, there is another way to make it. As Shruti, our tea blender in Siliguri, said in 2015, “Moms across the country have always thrown spices into the chai. Everyone has her own secret recipe for the kadak masala chai. But professionally, tea blending is still pretty new in India.”

Regional chai has been our plan from the start. Our blends follow the chai of each region, from Kolkata’s street chai to Kashmir’s saffron and rose.

Both belong to an old Indian habit of brewing kitchen spices and herbs, and both are about flavor and ritual here rather than cures.

Ours include Rajasik for the morning, Rasayana for the evening and, in our Herbal Chai collection, the caffeine-free Abhay Ras. Each blend, and how to brew it, is in Our chai range.

Our old Tea 101 guide put a cup of chai at about the same as a cup of black tea, roughly 50 mg. Our chai FAQ says the same in plain terms: our masala chais contain caffeine because they are made mainly from black CTC tea.

It is worth knowing. Caffeine has been the question our customers ask us most every year since 2022, and some had not realized that a chai contains any.

The real figure in your cup varies with the leaf, how much of it you use, the water temperature and how long you simmer it, and with the size of the cup; milk softens the taste but does not take caffeine out. Spices do not add caffeine. Kashmiri kahwa is a green tea, so it has some caffeine too. For the details, and how chai compares with coffee, see Does chai have caffeine?

As our old Tea 101 guide admitted, “chai is not a natural inclusion in tea research.”

Cardamom, ginger, cinnamon, clove and tulsi have a long place in Indian kitchens and in Ayurveda, and a cup of chai carries that tradition. Many of the claims made for chai online, including some in our own older posts, go further than the evidence. Milk and sugar are part of the cup as well.

Sugar is the part you control. Peter Keen, writing for us, found that ready-made chai drinks “almost all list the sugar content per cup as around 45 grams,” at about 4.2 grams to the teaspoon, and reminded readers that sugar is “not an intrinsic ingredient of tea but something added to it.” At home you can add the milk and sugar to taste. We look at what studies have and have not shown in Is chai good for you?

Traders from Bengal and Gujarat, with better access to milk and spices, were among the first to blend them with the tea.

Our old Tea 101 checklist still holds:

• Look for natural ingredients, not artificial flavorings; that keeps your cup closest to authentic Indian chai.
• Dry tea and granules should have no moisture or off notes.
• Look for strength and brightness when it brews.
• Long, well-rolled leaves are a sign of quality in a loose leaf chai.
• Read the label for allergens: some blends contain nuts, such as the almonds in kahwa.

The allergen point matters. Nut questions come up again and again from our customers, and on our site today only Kashmiri Kahwa declares an allergen, almond.

Look at the spices, too. Peter Keen’s advice was to focus on them, noting that the best chai makers tend to show the cinnamon sticks, cardamom pods and black peppercorns they use. He warned that white cardamom is a second-grade green pod bleached with hydrogen peroxide, and that much of the “cinnamon” sold in the US is cassia, while true cinnamon is the inner bark rolled into quills.

For loose tea to make chai from scratch, our writers’ advice is a strong, “kick-you-in-the-face” black tea: lowland teas grown nearer sea level, such as a full-bodied Assam, loose leaf or CTC. See Assam tea, or start with our Classic Assam Black.