What Is in a Cup of Chai? The Tea, the Spices, the Milk and the Sugar

Our own masala chais are made the same way: our chai FAQ describes them as “primarily made from black CTC tea.” CTC (crush, tear, curl) leaf is cut into small granules that give up their color and strength quickly, which is what a cup needs when it is about to be diluted with milk and sweetened.

Keen, writing for our blog in 2017, traced chai’s rise as India’s household and street drink to the shift from hand-processed whole leaf, mostly exported, to lower-cost CTC. CTC, he wrote, is “the base for tea bags and for chai,” fast-brewing and easy to add flavorings to.

How much leaf, and how much caffeine

Brewed tea has close to no calories. It does carry caffeine: Tea 101 puts a cup of chai at about the same as a cup of black tea, roughly 50 mg, though the real amount varies with the leaf, how much you use, the water temperature and how long it brews. Our chais made with tea leaf carry a High caffeine rating on our product pages.

How much leaf goes in matters as much as which leaf. Our steeping sheet gives one teaspoon, about 2.5 g, for every 150 ml cup of chai, and our training deck gives 2.5 g for 180 ml. For the full picture, including decaf and caffeine-free chais, see Does chai have caffeine?

The quantities are small: a pinch of masala or a small piece of ginger shared across two or three cups. In Indian homes a chai is often named for its main addition: ginger makes it adrak chai, fennel makes it saunf wali chai.

Our staff training manual adds ajwain (bishop’s weed) to the list of chai spices. Keen’s list for a fine masala chai was cardamom, cinnamon, ginger, cloves, mace, nutmeg and pepper, with fennel, lemongrass, saffron and “even ajwain,” which he called “a pungent and bitter herb.”

At home the choice is often whatever is at hand. One of our writers remembered her mother tossing in “anything she could reach in her spice box, cardamom, cinnamon, clove, fennel” when it was raining or nippy outside. More on blends in Chai spices and chai masala.

That works out to roughly 75 ml of milk in a cup. Milk also contains its own natural sugar (lactose), about 5 g per 100 g, which is why a chai with no added sugar still shows a few grams of sugar on paper.

Home recipes vary widely, and the milk is where they vary most. Our 2016 blog recipe used three-quarters of a cup of water to half a cup of milk. One writer’s mother worked the other way around, with “one part water, two parts milk.” The more milk, the more calories, as the table on the main guide shows.

Ginger and milk

Ginger has an odd relationship with milk. A Mumbai chai lover who wrote for our blog found his ginger chai curdled whenever he made more than one cup. The reason, he learned from research on cheesemaking, is an enzyme in ginger that clots milk protein most actively above 60°C and is switched off above 70°C. His fix: boil the ginger in the water first, or add it only once the milk is very hot. Our founder’s verdict on that story, when he shared it in 2020: “If you love your Ginger Chai, this is a must read.”

The writer, Srinath Perur, found that the two fixes taste different. Boiling the ginger in water first gives the chai “a brash ginger burn,” while adding it to milk hot enough to sizzle against the side of the pan gives “a mellow glow.” Read the whole story in The Science Behind My Ginger Chai.

A street-side chai in India is often generously sweet; the same blog writer called the chai at his local stall “a tea-flavored energy drink.” On high-altitude treks, one of our writers found that the camp cook, careful with his spices, “compensates with sugar,” so the last milky chai of the night “also doubles up as the dessert.”

Many home cups are far lighter. One writer’s mother made her chai with “just one short spoon of sugar.” Another remembered her mother’s “milky cardamom tea with half a teaspoon of sugar.” That half teaspoon is the sugar in our lighter chai recipe. On World Diabetes Day in 2024 we asked our own customers to “rethink our sugar habits,” and to add less sugar to their chai or choose chais that need little or none.

Its listing names the spices as cardamom, ginger, cloves, cinnamon, black pepper, nutmeg and saffron, and declares “Contains Milk Solids,” so it is not suitable for anyone avoiding dairy. A pack holds ten 14 g sachets, each made up with 100 ml of hot water.

No added sugar is not the same as sugar-free, and the listing says so: “It is not sugar-free, but it contains No Added Sugar. Any sugar present comes naturally from the dairy whitener (lactose).” Its caffeine comes from the Assam tea extract, at a level the listing calls “similar to a regular cup of chai.”