Masala chai

Masala chai is the spiced milk tea of the Indian subcontinent: strong black tea simmered together with milk, a generous amount of sugar and a blend of warming aromatic spices — most often cardamom, ginger, cinnamon, cloves and black pepper. The result is a sweet, creamy, fragrant cup, brisk with tannin and caffeine from the tea but rounded by the milk and lifted by the spices into something warming and comforting. "Chai" is simply the word for tea across much of Asia, so "chai tea" is a redundancy; what English speakers usually mean by "chai" is specifically masala chai — masala meaning a spice mixture. It is sold from countless roadside stalls across India by vendors called chai wallahs and brewed at home daily, and in the West it has spread as the "chai latte" and as powdered and syrup concentrates.