I use Stash-brand tea bags to make chai tea. Very tasty amd quite reasonable. I think it’s $2.89 for 20 bags. You can then add whatever type of sweetener you like, sugar or Sweet & Low.
The mixes seem overly-sweet, IMO, like those International Coffees. Using the tea bags means it’s really tea; not some powdered mix junk.
I meant to say: Stash makes a variety of teas, and the Chai comes in a red box.
Tea came from China, where it’s called an approximation of ‘cha’ in Mandarin. In Malay, this got transliterated to ‘teh’, which is where the English language got ‘tea’. Meanwhile when it arrived in india, the same word ‘cha’ got transliterated from Mandarin into ‘chai’. In other words, they all have the same root, but different routes.
‘Chai’ tea’ is therefore a tautology.
In India, these guys walk through trains shouting “chaichaichaichaichai”, dispensing hot sweet spicy goodness from a flask. They pronounce it with a ‘ch’ sound.
Correction: it appears that the adoption of ‘teh’ by the west was actually from the Amoy dialect of China, which is presumably where the Malays got it from too.
Tea is “chai” in Russian, too, pronounced with a -ch sound.
Vanilla, if you want to get into chai, definitely go for the stuff you brew and not the mixes, which taste approximately like spiced waxy cardboard. My all-time favorite tea resource is Tealuxe. They have teas from all over the world, of all different kinds. They have seven kinds of chai available, and just about any other tea you can think of – and plenty more that are probably new to you.
I lean more to black teas, but they have exceptional green and herbal teas as well. My favorite black tea above all, hands-down, is their Tiger Hill Nilgri, which makes the most lovely, clear iced tea ever. Other fabulous ones are the Puttabong Estate Darjeeling, the Ceylon Kenilworth, the Copley Vanilla, and the Buckingham Palace Garden Party. Of their chais I’ve tried the Masala Chai and the Kashmiri Chai, both of which are outstanding,
What’s really cool is that since their teas are loose-leaf and sold by weight, you can get small one-pot packets (10g) for $1 for most teas, and $2 for the really premium stuff. So you can spend pocket change to try out a bunch of different kinds to find the ones you really love. Tealuxe rules, y’all.