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POURCRAFT BAR

TEA

Spiced Chai Concentrate

A double-strength spiced black tea base, bottled, then cut one to one with milk hot or cold.

  • 4Water76%4 cups
  • 1Sugar19%1 cup
  • 1/4Black tea5%6 tbsp loose leaf
Ice
Standard cubes for the iced version
Glass
Mug, or a 12 oz glass over ice
Serves
8

Ingredients

Batch size

8 servings
  • 4 cupswater
  • 6 tbspstrong loose-leaf black tea, such as AssamSwap: 8 black tea bags, opened out of their bags for better contact
  • 1 cupgranulated sugarSwap: Demerara, for a deeper and slightly smoky base
  • 8green cardamom pods, cracked open
  • 2cinnamon sticks, brokenSwap: 1 tsp ground cinnamon, added at the end of the simmer
  • 1 infresh ginger, sliced thin
  • 10black peppercorns
  • 4whole cloves

Method

  1. Crack the whole spices, do not grind them

    Cracked pods and broken sticks give the water access to the inside without releasing the fine powder that makes the finished concentrate cloudy and gritty at the bottom of the bottle.

  2. Simmer the spices in water on their own first

    15 minutes at a bare simmer, lid on

    Spices need heat and time; tea does not. Starting them together means either under-extracted spice or ruined tea, and this order avoids having to choose.

  3. Take it off the heat, then add the tea

    5 minutes, no longer

    Black tea held at a simmer turns harsh quickly. Off the heat it extracts fully in a few minutes and stops short of the tannic edge that makes people add more sugar than they meant to.

  4. Strain, then dissolve the sugar while it is hot

    A cup of sugar goes into hot liquid in under a minute and into cold liquid grudgingly. Straining first means you are not stirring sugar around a pan of spent leaves.

  5. Cool it fully before bottling

    Warm liquid put straight into a sealed bottle in the refrigerator both takes a long time to come down and warms everything around it. Let it reach room temperature first.

  6. Serve one to one with milk

    Equal parts concentrate and milk, heated together for a hot chai or poured over ice for a cold one. Frothing the milk before it meets the concentrate makes a noticeably better hot version.

The one thing that ruins it

Boiling the tea leaves along with the spices for the full simmer. Fifteen minutes of heat on black tea produces a bitterness that no quantity of milk or sugar will hide.

Tools you actually need

If you need one

01Strongest aeration
Maestri House LunaFro Rechargeable Frother

Maestri House

Maestri House LunaFro Rechargeable Frother

The only frother here that states its motor speed — 8000 RPM — alongside a 1200 mAh battery and two detachable whisks. Speed is the specification that matters for this category, because aeration is a race against the dairy warming up.

Best for
Cold foam, where the whole job has to finish in about twenty seconds
Key spec
8000 RPM motor, 1200 mAh battery, 2 detachable whisks, stand
  • States 8000 RPM, the only speed figure published across this lineup
  • Two detachable whisks cover foam and powder dispersion separately
  • Detachable heads can be washed properly rather than rinsed in place
  • Stand included, which is what keeps it on the counter and in use
  • Rechargeable means it is unusable while flat, unlike a battery unit
  • Two whisk heads are two more small parts to lose
  • A 1200 mAh cell adds weight compared with an AA wand
View on Amazon

Technique behind this drink

Make it ahead, or batch it

This is a make-ahead by design and holds better than most syrups because of the sugar concentration. Keep it refrigerated in a sealed bottle and use the cold-storage guidance linked from the syrup ratios page as the reference for how long to hold it. On flavor, the spice keeps developing for the first two days and is at its best around then.

The trap in scaling this one is the spice, not the tea. Spice extraction depends on how long the water is actually in contact with a cracked pod, and in a bigger pot with a deeper bed of solids the simmer is gentler at the center — so a doubled batch simmered for the same fifteen minutes comes out noticeably weaker in the spice and identical in the tea, which reads as flat and one-note. Give a doubled batch about five extra minutes on the spices, and keep the tea steep at five minutes regardless of volume, because that step is limited by temperature rather than by quantity. Sugar scales exactly; do not reduce it proportionally, since it is also what makes the concentrate keep.