The Curse of Iced Chai
Confession: I hate iced chai. I keep buying it because I feel like I should like it, considering my deep love affair with masala chai and my Indian heritage. Plus, sometimes it’s just too darn hot for a traditional cup of chai, but I still need those flavors in my day, you know?
Every time I order the iced version, though, I’m faced with a tall, cool glass of blandness – watered down, syrupy, and resembling chai in name only. When I make it at home, it’s not much better. What I crave is an ice-cold cup bursting with slightly sweetened, aromatic spices that dance alongside the tannic tea and creamy milk in perfect harmony. Is that so hard?
It turns out, it’s not. After a bunch of research and many, many tests, I’ve arrived at an easy recipe for iced chai that packs the punch of flavor I’ve always been looking for.
The Trouble with Premade Iced Chai
First, a little background. While a quick Amazon search for iced coffee yields ready-made iced coffee, cold brew, instant iced coffee powder, cold-brew pitchers, flavored syrups, ground coffee, and coffee concentrate, a search for iced chai yields only two kinds of products: liquid concentrates and powdered instant chai.
Chai concentrates are typically made of tea brewed with half the standard amount of liquid (always water), plus spices and often a sweetener. They’re shelf-stable until opened, then kept in the fridge for a few weeks. To drink, you dilute the concentrate with an equal amount of milk. A huge benefit to these concentrates is that you don’t need to wait for the chai to cool down before you drink it.
While there are some good concentrates produced by Indian Americans on the market, I find that many are produced by white entrepreneurs and taste nothing like chai. Concentrates tend to be overly sweet and often lack that punch of fresh aromatics you get when brewing tea and spices together for chai.
Powdered instant chai typically contains instant tea, spices, milk powder, and a sweetener. You simply add hot or cold water and stir. Instant chai loses a lot of the nuances of freshly brewed tea, and the last few sips are often full of gritty spices. The flavors are sometimes more muted than anything made from a brewed concentrate because these formulations start with spice essences or raw spices that would need to be simmered to properly rehydrate.
The Science of Iced Chai
A freshly made hot cup of chai is spicy and aromatic, creamy and perfectly sweet. But iced chai is almost never all of those things. I’d noticed that when my hot cup of chai cools down while I’m drinking it, the spices and the sweetness just aren’t as intense.
Over the phone, Harold McGee, author of On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen, explained to me that this happens because our receptors for those flavors are more active at relatively high temperatures. If your taste receptors are at cooler temperatures than is ideal for them to work, then they’re not going to respond as actively.
Generally speaking, McGee explained, these receptors start working around body temperature (98.6°F) and can become more sensitive as the temperature heats up. If I wanted to taste the spices more in my iced chai, grinding them finer than I do for my dried ginger masala chai might intensify their flavors, helping them to stand up against the cold.
I’d also need to add a bit more sugar than I do in my traditional chai recipe if I wanted to experience the same level of sweetness. Ayan Sanyal of Kolkata Chai Co agrees that chai, hot or iced, just doesn’t taste as spicy without a little sugar.
But why? McGee explains that our taste experiences are multisensory. The brain takes into account not only flavor, but also aroma and touch – the temperature, texture, etc. Depending on what tastes accompany the aroma that we’re experiencing, our sensitivity to those aromas may be either greater or lesser.
On their own, the aromas of spices cooked in a bland liquid like water don’t really register with the brain, perhaps because there is no nutritional value in it. But once you add sugar, its scent is a flag to the brain to pay attention, because it adds nutritional value. With that signal flipped on, you can taste the spices more.
Discovering the Perfect Method
My tests began with my dried ginger masala chai recipe. I wanted to keep ingredients and measurements consistent while I zeroed in on a preparation method.
My base recipe simmers together granules of CTC Assam tea and spices for 20 minutes total – 10 minutes with only water, and 10 after adding the milk, to help rehydrate the dried spices and intensify the flavors.
In the past, I always started my iced chai by making hot masala chai on the stove, straining it, and letting it cool to room temperature slowly before moving it to the fridge. I decided to compare this method with the methods frequently seen in coffee and tea shops: concentrates and cold brew.
My old method wasn’t cutting it. After letting the chai cool to room temperature and storing it in the fridge overnight, the flavors were dull and stale. You could taste how long it had sat.
For my concentrate, I planned to brew the tea and spices in water that measured half of the total liquid called for, then strain the mixture, add sugar, and cool. Since the original recipe uses a 1:1 ratio of water to milk, I planned on diluting the concentrate with an equal amount of milk. But the results were disappointing. This version tasted like a milky iced tea with no spices, just a strong tea flavor.
Cold brew relies on time rather than heat for brewing. To make cold brew iced chai, I used this cold brew iced tea method as a guide, adding the tea and spices to a pitcher, topping it with cold filtered water, then covering and chilling for 18 hours. I mixed equal parts cold brew and milk with simple syrup to serve. It was definitely the easiest of the methods, but I could barely taste the spices, and the tea flavor was weak, lacking that characteristic strength and robust flavor.
The Winning Method
Ali Roth, owner of Blue Willow Tea in Berkeley, California, explains that steeping chai in cold water naturally leads to less astringency from the tea, and chai – hot or cold – actually needs a bit of astringency to retain nuances of flavor and balance the richness of the milk. So Roth steams loose tea leaves until fragrant before cold brewing, which she says brings back some of the tannins to bolster the cup.
Perhaps it would be more fair to call this a hybrid cold brew method, since it does rely on some heat for flavor. I tried a similar method without the steaming – simmering spices in some water briefly, adding CTC tea to bring out some astringency, and finally pouring in cold filtered water to steep in the fridge for 18 hours. This was mixed with milk in a 1:1 ratio and sweetened with simple syrup. This method yielded a more balanced flavor, and I tasted more of the spices and the robust black tea, but it still wasn’t bold enough for me.
When I was interviewing Ayan Sanyal of Kolkata Chai Co for my earlier dive into masala chai, he shared how he created their cold chai recipe, which is available on their website. Sanyal was inspired by a Japanese flash-brewed iced coffee method, in which you brew coffee extra strong, then let it drip directly over ice, which instantly cools it, retaining some acidity and complexity of flavor that traditional cold brew loses.
In addition to an intense, more well-rounded flavor, I loved that this method cools quickly, so you can have your cold beverage now rather than 18 hours from now.
This inspired my final test – a Japanese iced coffee-inspired method for chai. It started by simmering the spices and tea in whole milk that measured half of the total desired liquid, then straining, adding sugar, and pouring the hot liquid over an equal quantity by weight of ice. Stirring or shaking until the ice melts means you wind up with the proper amount of added water.
The acidity of the tea and the high heat required to extract the most flavor in the shortest amount of time can both cause milk to scorch or curdle. Harold McGee‘s On Food and Cooking offers a tip: rinsing the pan out with water just before adding the milk helps. It’s also important to stir the sides of the pan frequently.
To cut down on cooking time, McGee also suggested that I brew the chai in a larger pan with more surface area for evaporation.
This version was the winner by far. It tasted the closest to a hot cup of chai, just chilled – an explosion of flavors, the ginger revealing its spicy heat and lemongrass undertones, the black pepper with its fruity, sharp punch, and the green cardamom with its sweet, slightly minty and citrusy notes, all perfectly balanced with tannic tea and creamy milk. It was icy, perfectly sweet, and ready within 20 minutes (a smaller batch is even quicker). It works equally well with plant-based milk, and it kept those strong, balanced flavors for three days in the fridge, which means you don’t need to drink it all at once.
The Secret Ingredient
But why does this method work so well? Alex Powar, a coffee educator and tea drinker who grew up drinking and making chai, suggested over email that some compounds in the spices are fat-soluble, and boiling with milk provides enough fat to extract the full range of flavor from those spices that give masala chai its name.
Harold McGee agreed that milk fats do absorb aromatic, volatile molecules, but wasn’t sure that was the secret to this method’s success. “Those volatiles can end up trapped in the droplets of milk fat and actually make them less prominent than in a plain water extract,” he said. However, McGee surmised that cooking the milk long enough to reduce it yielded pleasant flavors that likely contributed to this cup’s success.
McGee also noted that when you cook spices, you infuse aromatics, but also lose some to vapor, so it may help that this method cooks for a shorter time than traditional hot chai that’s cooled slowly.
There’s one more reason this iced chai tastes better than any cold brew or concentrate I’d had: the method doesn’t require a long cooling or refrigeration period. During long periods of cooling/refrigeration, aromatics can also end up clustering together, visible as clouding of the water concentrates, which would make them less available for us to smell than they would be in the freshly made version.
My relationship with iced chai is on much more solid ground these days. With this recipe, I’ve moved from barely tolerating it to making it every time the temperature rises above 65°F. It’s a helpful reminder that I don’t actually hate that many options in the world of food and drink – I simply need to understand them better to dial in the recipes I love.
So the next time you’re craving the complex, aromatic flavors of chai but the weather has you reaching for something icy, give this method a try. Trust me, your taste buds will thank you. And who knows, you might just convert a fellow iced chai hater in the process.
Happy brewing, my friends! Cheers to mastering the perfect cup of iced chai.
