How to Brew the Perfect Cup of Chai

The Easy Way

To brew a delicious cup of chai, you'll need the following items:

• Sauce pan. It's recommended to use a pan that is larger than however many cups you plan to make. Leaving room for the mixture to boil and foam is important.
• 1 cup milk/alternative. Chai is generally made with whole milk, but a lot of people in Western countries tend to substitute with something else like oat milk.
• 1 cup water
• 1 tbsp Yatri Chai Original Masala Chai Mix. You'll want to use about 1 tbsp for every 2 cups of liquid. We're not selling online yet, but find us at any of the markets we sell at!
• Sweetener of your choice. Start with 1 teaspoon and work your way up until the sweetness is where you want it. We usually use jaggery, which is an unrefined sugar made from concentrated sugar cane juice.

From there, the process only takes a few minutes.

1. First, combine the water and milk (alternative) in the sauce pan and bring to a simmering boil.
2. Add the Yatri Chai Original Masala Chai Mix along with the sweetener.
3. Boil the mixture for 4 - 5 minutes until it becomes a nice, rich caramel color.
4. Strain into a cup and enjoy!

The mixture at some point while boiling should become quite foamy and bubbly. Just make sure you stir and spoon the chai a lot so it doesn't boil over.

Finding Your Perfect Chai with Yatri

Even for something like brewing chai, there are a lot of knobs you can tweak to find the perfect cup of chai for yourself.

From our experiments, we've discovered the following key things:

• The texture of the chai depends on fat and protein content. The chai we sell at farmers' markets uses whole milk (8g fat, 8g protein/cup) and full fat oat milk (9g fat, 3g protein/cup). If you want to use different alternatives, keep an eye on the fat and protein amounts. For example, a cup of almond milk tends to be very thin (only 3g fat and 1g protein). In this case, you may consider omitting water entirely and just using 2 cups of almond milk per portion.
• Pro Hack: If your chai is coming out very thin using milk alternatives, you can make it creamier by adding small amounts of coconut cream or coconut milk (or anything with a high fat content).
• If you want stronger chai, use more tea mix - don't boil longer. Usually,  boiling longer will extract more flavor from tea and spices. But this is only recommended up to a certain point - when you cook tea and spices too long, they become very bitter, and some compounds start to break down, leading to duller flavors from the spices! So if you want a stronger chai that maintains potency from spices, add more chai mix. We don't recommend boiling any chai longer than 5-6 minutes.
• You can experiment with additional spices and herbs like fresh ginger and mint. If you like an extra zing, you can try grating fresh ginger into your chai. Mint leaves can also add a great flavor to the chai. Our pumpkin spice chai has healthy amounts of freshly crushed nutmeg!
• You can scale this up to a certain point. If you want to make more chai to serve more people, you can basically scale this linearly up to about 8 cups (4 cups of milk/alternative, 4 cups of water, 4 tablespoons tea mix). Anything beyond that and things start getting very funky. Trust us, we've learned from making batches of many, many gallons. What's the secret? Well... it's a secret 😉

We're excited to finally have filmed this video and put out this article for all of you to find the perfect cup of chai with Yatri's chai mix! If you have any questions or concerns, you are always welcome to reach us via the Contact page or by emailing us at info[at]yatrichai.com.

Enjoy!