Masala Chai

A warm, yummy, spicy chai that I always drink with milk and a bit of sweetener. Perfect for winter!

This one is more hit or miss than a lot of them. It’s good, but it’s fussy. Some days the cup is perfect, some days it just doesn’t quite live up to its smell.

I am forever on the hunt for a perfectly balanced chai, though to me this was not as smooth as Ineeka’s Ma-Chai? It was still both good and not so spicy I couldn’t taste anything correctly, very balanced.

The actual tea is not quite as strong as I’d hoped, but the balance of spices is great.

I really well rounded Chai, where you can taste all the different spices but none of them are too overpowering. I’ve tried a lot of Chais before and this is probably one of my favorites.

This blend of masala chai is pretty aggressively spiced, which I like. Some of my housemates say that the peppercorns are too aggressive in the tea. I’d say that this tea is pretty spicy, but the tea leaves have a sometimes unfortunate tendency to bitterness, even though I steeped it less than the recommended five minutes.

I might have to try again with a gentler brewing. Then again, I drank it straight without milk or sugar, so that might be a factor.

Not as spicy as I’d like, but still tasty.

I mostly detect clove with a little bit of cinnamon. I’m not sure if there is any orange rind in here or not, but I’m picking up hints of that as well. I’m not much of a chai person, but this is a worthy effort. It’s one of the rare chais I’ve preferred without milk.

I used this spicy little blend to make a tea latte. Upon opening the pouch, my nose was assaulted by clove and cinnamon, making me think this would make an amazing stove top potpourri. Brewing yields an unremarkable light medium amber brown color. The aroma, as with most chais, is simply intoxicating. The taste, however, is a bit underwhelming. The chai I make from scratch has SO much more flavor with only tea leaves and one spice. This particular chai begs for more cardamom. While this chai blend is decent, I anticipated a stronger, heartier and more robust flavor rolling around in my mouth. The spices blend well with the tea leaves, helped by the vigorous snap of the ginger, so I’d be willing to keep this in my cupboard…as an emergency back up.