Random tea thing I just HAD to share

[dr4b]

We have a bunch of different tea bags available in the tea/coffee room here at work. I've been drinking hot tea all week since my throat is sore.

Today I noticed we have a Tazo chai tea teabag, and I love chai so I thought I'd try it.

It sure smells like chai, but doesn't taste nearly as good as the stuff I think of as chai.

I've left the teabag in the mug as I drink it. The less and less liquid there is in the mug, the worse it tastes, but the better it smells.

Comments

[nikari.livejournal.com]

Maybe you're just used to chai being sweet? Unsweetened chai isn't that great.

[mh75.livejournal.com]

1) There is chemistry involved in brewing tea. Brew time has an effect. The bitter componenets in tea take a while to be released, so if you leave tea brewing for a long time the bitterness starts to come out. Josh can tell you more about this than you care to know, but, in short, i am not surprised that the chai tastes worse as you let it sit.

2) Tazo can suck. I haven't tried their chai.

3) What Nikari said. Drinking 'chai' that is finished usually involved having added sweeteners, and often milk, along with spices. Usually tea bags include the spices but not the sweetener or milk.

Good luck with your tea drinking - it can be a joy.

[bhudson.livejournal.com]

You want to steep black tea about 5 minutes in boiling water; green tea for about 2-3 minutes in 190-degree water; oolong is halfway. Masala chai (at least in this country) tends to be made with black Assam tea, which is rather more robust to oversteeping than most teas, but you certainly want to remove the bag after some time. That said, when I went to the tea shop in Providence, they instructed us to steep their spiced tea bags for seven minutes. Milk and sugar can mask the bitterness, but not eliminate it (they can turn barely-undrinkable into barely-drinkable); beyond that, they do funny (yummy) things to Assam that I haven't quite yet understood for lack of practice.

Also, don't drain the bag into the cup if you can avoid it: the bitter compounds seem just not to be quite so motile, even when they have started to dissolve, so by removing the bag and the water in the bag, you can avoid mixing them in to your cup. Again, this is far more important with teas other than Assam.

[thatenglishguy.livejournal.com]

American chai is nothing like real chai. Leaving the tea bag in probably wouldn't help.

[alibash.livejournal.com]

you're sure that was a tea-bag and not a potpurri-bag? =p

but yeah, if memory serves, chai isnt so much a tea as it is spicy milk...now that im lactose intolerant, i dont touch that genre so much, but yeah, next time maybe more milk? ;)

[leora.livejournal.com]

Chai is a misleading term. I forget what language it comes from, but it just means "tea". So, it can vary a lot. However, what most people think of as chai requires milk to count as chai. It's generally tea infused with spices mixed with milk and often mixed with honey. Leave out the milk and honey and the balance of spices isn't right for the beverage. It's like making a cake and leaving out the sugar... it just won't taste right. So, you probably need to try mixing in stuff to see if it's good. Or it could just be a sucky blend. Or one just not to your tastes. I don't like chais that put anise in, because I just can't stand anise, but some people quite like it. And I'm only vaguely tolerant of fennel, another common chai variant flavoring.

[bhudson.livejournal.com]

Chai is most directly borrowed from some version of Indian, because us whities are too lazy to say masala chai (which is basically just "spiced tea") -- but the word is highly preserved across languages (cha, chai, tea, thé, ...) so it's clearly a recent addition to the lexicon.

[leora.livejournal.com]

Well, in all fairness... "masala chai" is 4 whole syllables and "chai" is just one. We're mortal and time is ticking. We need to cut corners where we can. We just can't afford 3 extra syllables.

[bhudson.livejournal.com]

Heh :)

Almost unrelated: I just learned that breakfast in portuguese (at least in northern Brazil) is "morning coffee."

[msde.livejournal.com]

I've had chai several times, and honestly I have no idea what the tea portion of it tastes like. Milk tea is still a very strange concept to me, as they sound like they go together about as well as orange juice and soda.

Of course, stick enough sugar and boba in milk tea and it tastes fine.

[discofish.livejournal.com]

For chai, I don't trust teabags. Mostly because I had a similar experience to yours, and it was just... bad. For the "fake American chai" that I know and love, I trust Oregon Chai (packets or concentrate cartons). For the discerning chai enthusiast, my friend in the know insists that the best way to get chai is to actually go to an Indian market.

[bhudson.livejournal.com]

I rather liked the Bengal Spice from Celestial Seasonings until I went all snobby (a development helped along by my roomate's tendency to dump a couple balls of assam tea, some coriander pods, cinnamon sticks, and cloves into a pot of boiling water, to be topped off by sugar and milk in the last minute or so of cooking).

[bayareajenn.livejournal.com]

Are you sure you didn't just get it out of a Nutri-Matic? ;-)

"...which had provided [her] with a plastic cup filled with a liquid that was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike [chai]."