I get asked this a lot, usually with a slight hesitation: "Is it okay to make chai with your tea?"
As if they're confessing to something.
Let me be clear: yes. Absolutely. Our tea was made for this.
There's a strange snobbery in some tea circles about spiced, sweetened, milky chai. As if the "pure" way to drink tea is alone in a cup, unadulterated, probably while contemplating something profound. And look, I enjoy tea that way too. But chai isn't a corruption of tea. In Assam, it's just... tea. It's how we drink it.
Walk into any roadside stall in our district and you'll find chai bubbling away in a battered pot. Strong black tea, boiled with milk, sweetened with sugar or jaggery, maybe with ginger or cardamom or both. It's not subtle. It's not trying to be. It's hot and sweet and strong, and after a morning in the garden there's nothing better.
Our CTC is built for this. The robust, malty character doesn't disappear when you add milk—it holds its ground. The spices complement rather than overwhelm. It becomes something more than the sum of its parts.
So yes, make chai. Add as much milk as you like. Throw in ginger, cardamom, cinnamon, black pepper—whatever your family recipe calls for. Boil it longer than any tea purist would approve of.
You're not disrespecting the tea. You're drinking it exactly as it was meant to be drunk, in the place where it was grown, by the people who grow it.