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The real story of how chai came to be

Susmita Das Gupta, the founder of the Indian School of Tea, explains that we’re drinking tea incorrectly

Turns out, we’ve been drinking tea wrong the whole time. It’s that whole milk business, the should you add a dash or a splash, should you add it before or after you make the brew? Susmita Das Gupta, the founder of the Indian School of Tea, which is located in Bengaluru, is quick to point out that tea’s roots can be traced back to China, and the kind of tea it excels in is green tea, “with which you would definitely not add a drop of milk”.

So, is kadak tea wrong? Not really, it’s a recipe. “Chai is a recipe, tea is the product used to make chai,” says Das Gupta, explaining that it’s an important distinction to make. “According to official figures 64 percent of Indians drink ‘tea’ but they really know nothing about how to drink it. We as a mass didn’t begin slurping on it until the 1950s. So it's a relatively new beverage for us to drink even though we have been producing tea for almost 200 years now,” she adds.

Because we’ve been drinking tea ‘the chai way’, “because that’s what the British taught us, we don’t really know how to appreciate the types of tea – from Darjeeling to Himachal to Meghalaya and Tripura – we produce.”

She’s out to change this. The Indian School of Tea launched on April 16 and the programmes kicked off later that month. “The first programme on offer is a weekend programme, held on Sundays. It runs from 10am to 5pm and can be attended by anyone from anywhere in the world. The online – and in person - classes address the very basics of tea, from how one should drink it, what are the types, how can you identify the flavour profile of the tea, etc. The first thing to understand is, India makes four types of tea: white, green, oolong, and black.

Infusions and tea

And, says Das Gupta, not everything we call tea today is actually tea. She is animated over Zoom as she points out that herbal teas are nothing but herbs in hot water, they have no actual ‘tea’ in them. So it could be a flower like chamomile, it could be a root like ginger, but there’s no tea leaf. When herbs are added to tea, they are called infusions or tisane. “The third one is called blended tea, which happens when you blend more than two types of tea.”

The second thing to note, if you truly want the best brew, is the process of making it. “Each of these types have a unique brewing and steeping process. So, the way you brew and steep a white tea is very different from the way you brew and steep a black tea, because of the oxidization of the tea. Similarly, when you are brewing and steeping a herbal infusion, say for example, hibiscus and how you brew a jasmine is very different, because hibiscus will give you the flavour immediately. But if you brew Jasmine for a longer period it will become bitter,” she says.

She calls it the responsibility of the industry to explain to the masses, how these varieties should be enjoyed. “We produce some 183 million cases of tea every year and we make huge amount of money out of it. Yet, India's report shows that our consumption is going down, we are getting stiff competition from coffee. It’s up to the tea industry to catch up and create places where people can learn about and enjoy tea,” she adds.

She admits that there are strides being made however, “Now, the Indian Chamber of Commerce has created a tea committee to build awareness, but it will take time to get through to the public.”

So getting back to how the milk-in-tea situation came about, she explains: “Tea used to be very expensive in London, because they paid silver to buy it. As was sugar at the time [in the early 1800s]. The product became the fashion statement for the rich and the wealthy. Milk was not a not a common person’s drink in the UK either. “Putting forth a tray with three expensive products became a flex. “Hence, the British never learned [to drink tea properly],” says Das Gupta. “ Now come back to India. So, to take the control of tea from China, the British launched the Opium Wars and then started planting tea there.” This tea was ferried back to the UK where it was sold for a profit – until they found a saturated market and realised they needed a domestic selling point too.

Cheaper version

“They created a quicker and cheaper version because the price of the earlier teas was so expensive, it was it was not possible for the average Indian household to drink on a daily basis. To enhance the production of the tea and also to make a cheaper quality of tea, a gentleman in the 1930s started a process called crush, tear, and curl (CTC), which was more economical, in Assam.”

There was also a time when the drink was thought to be poisonous in India and the Father of India, Mahatma Gandhi also put forth an anti-tea campaign that termed tea an ‘anti-National product’.

“To counter this, companies like Brooke Bond, which was a British company those days, started coming to India and selling tea door to door. How? They would come in the morning when the cows would be brought by milkmen to homes for fresh milk. They would take some tea and add it to this fresh milk and ask the million-rupee question, ‘how can it be bad for you when you are putting so much milk, which is so healthy, in it?’”

Later, sugar was added to the mix to make it even more palatable – and we ended up with a pour of milk and sprinkling of tea leaves in our concoction.

It was their recipe for success.

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