Chai latte
A café drink built from spiced concentrate or syrup topped with steamed milk. It is a distinct preparation from masala chai rather than a version of it: the spices are usually pre-extracted into a syrup, and the tea is often a minor component or absent entirely.
Also called spiced tea latte.
What it tastes like
Sweet and heavily spiced, usually with cinnamon and vanilla leading. The tea, where present, sits well behind the spice — which is the clearest difference from a properly made masala chai.
What it is built on
Teas
- CTC black tea — Strong, quick and blunt. What CTC gives up in nuance it returns in reliability: it is very hard to under-brew and it holds colour and strength through milk and sugar in a way whole leaf rarely does.
Brewing method: Boiling and decoction — Leaf, and usually other ingredients, simmered in water or milk rather than steeped — the basis of masala chai, butter tea and noon chai.
Ingredients
- 60 ml Chai concentrate or spiced syrup
- 200 ml Steamed milk
Preparation
- Step 1. Warm the concentrate.
- Step 2. Top with steamed milk and foam.
Serves 1. About 3 minutes from start to finish, including anything that has to simmer or cool.
There is no single correct version
Modern and Western. Calling it 'chai tea' is redundant, since chai simply means tea in several languages, and the drink is not what that word names in the places it comes from.
The steps above are one workable account of how this is made, not the authoritative recipe. Households and regions differ on proportions, on order and sometimes on what counts as the drink at all.
Common mistakes
- Expecting it to taste like masala chai — it is a different preparation
Sources
This page is TeaHQ synthesis. The proportions and the sequence are written from common practice as TeaHQ understands it, with no external source behind them, which is one more reason to read the note on regional variation as the more reliable part of the page.
This page describes how the drink is made and where it is made that way. It says nothing about what drinking it does to a person, and the quantities of milk, sugar or spice are recorded because they are part of the recipe rather than as any kind of recommendation.
Written comparisons
Where TeaHQ has set this drink against something it is routinely confused with, and argued the differences out in full.
- Masala chai vs chai latte — One is a decoction made from whole spices and tea; the other is a syrup topped with milk. They are related by name and by very little else.