How to make chai concentrate that keeps five days

Chai takes eight minutes. Most mornings that is fine. Some mornings it is not, and that is the entire reason chai concentrate exists — you do the boiling once, keep it cold, and the rest of the week is a pour and a stir.

Concentrate is not a lesser version of chai. It is the same decoction, made stronger and without milk, so it keeps. You add the milk at the moment of drinking.

The loose-leaf method

This makes about 750 ml of concentrate, which is roughly twelve cups once you cut it with milk.

• 30 g loose-leaf masala chai — about six level tablespoons
• 1 L water
• Sweetener, if you want it in the batch rather than the cup

Bring the water to a rolling boil, mix the leaf in, and hold it at a strong simmer for twelve minutes (ten if you are using CTC). Longer than a single cup, because you are extracting harder and you have no milk to soften the edges. The liquid should reduce by roughly a quarter and go near-opaque.

Put the lid on, take it off the heat and let it sit another five minutes — this is where a lot of the spice actually arrives — then strain it twice. Once through a normal strainer, then once more through a paper filter or cheesecloth. The second pass is what stops the sediment that turns the last glass gritty.

Cool it on the counter, then refrigerate in a sealed bottle. Five days is the honest window. It will not spoil dramatically; it will just flatten, and you will notice.

The tea bag method

If what you have is a box of black tea bags and a few spices, you can still do this. It will not be as good — bagged tea is dust and gives up everything at once — but it is a great deal better than a syrup.

• 6 black tea bags (Assam or English Breakfast, not Earl Grey — the bergamot fights everything)
• 700 ml water
• 1 cinnamon stick, 6 green cardamom pods cracked open, 4 cloves, a thumb of fresh ginger sliced, 6 black peppercorns

Simmer the spices alone in the water for ten minutes first. This matters: the spices need far longer than the tea, and if you put everything in together you get bitter tea and underdeveloped spice. Then take the pan off the heat, add the bags, put the lid on and leave them five minutes. Squeeze them out, strain twice, cool, bottle.

Crack the cardamom pods with the flat of a knife before they go in. Whole sealed pods release almost nothing.

How to drink it

Roughly one part concentrate to one and a half parts milk hot — 2 oz to 3 oz — one to two over ice, and one to one if you like it kadak. Hot: warm the milk, pour the concentrate in, stir. Iced: fill the glass with ice, concentrate first, milk over the top, and let it marble before you stir it.

The trick worth knowing is freezing concentrate in an ice tray and using those cubes in an iced chai instead of water ice. It does not dilute as it melts — the drink gets stronger rather than weaker.

What goes wrong

Bitter. You boiled it too long or too hard. Keep to the twelve minutes above. If you are blending your own, simmer the spices first and add the tea for the last few minutes.

Watery once milk is in. The decoction was not concentrated enough. Use more leaf, not more time.

Separated or grainy after a few days. That is fine — it is spice sediment. Shake the bottle. If it smells sour rather than spiced, throw it out.

Is it worth making rather than buying?

Honestly, it depends on your week. Making it takes twenty minutes once and gives you five days of thirty-second chai. Buying it takes zero minutes and costs more per cup.

What is not worth doing is buying a sweetened concentrate. Once sugar is in the bottle you have lost the variable that matters most — and sweetened concentrate is where the majority of supermarket chai goes wrong.