Twinings – Spicy Chai
Twinings Spicy Chai is a blend of black tea, ginger, cinnamon and flavourings, and I don’t think I’m speaking out of turn here when I say that it really wants to be a chai latte. That cinnamony sweetness is just begging for a boatload of milk and sugar in order to realise its ambitions.
As any good tea nerd knows, ‘Chai’ means tea in Hindi. If you are in India, all your tea is chai, whether it’s got spices in it or not, but here in the UK, we tend to use the word ‘chai’ when talking about spiced tea.
Twinings do add the ‘spicy’ moniker to their blend because, let’s face it, when it comes to being tea nerds, those guys have put the hours in. (Approximately 2.6 million hours in fact.)
Interestingly, there are two root words for tea. One is the Mandarin word ‘cha’, and the other is the Min Nan word ‘te’. Countries who first imported tea over land, including India, Persia and Russia, use ‘chay’ or ‘chai’ for tea. Whereas countries who first imported tea by sea use ‘te’, ‘tee’ or ‘tea’. This is because tea was exported from Fujian, where Min Nan was spoken.
I drank this tea made with boiling water and just a splash of milk, but it still has a chai latte vibe. Chai lattes seem to be the default way to drink masala chai if you’re out and about and want to nip into a coffee chain for a bit of spicy camelia sinensis. Costa, Caffe Nero and Pret all have chai lattes on their menus but don’t offer spicy chai in any other format. So you can have your chai with a shedload of milk, fructose syrup, sugar and sucralose or not at all. The only high street coffee chain I found that offers a regular non-latte spicy chai was Starbucks.
This is not a complaint, by the way. I believe, that this is actually the proper way to do things. In India, spicy chai is sold by the roadside by chai wallahs, who add milk and sugar to the tea blend while the whole thing is brewing. So, I guess the chai latte is our closest Western approximation to that. (According to the Twinings website, the tea wallahs initially added spices and whatnot to their blends to cut back on the amount of tea they used and reduce their costs.)
Twinings are not firmly in either the latte or non-latte camp when it comes to their spicy chai. The brewing instructions simply instruct you to brew for three minutes and add sugar or a dash of milk if you want to. However, they also provide a host of chai latte recipes on their website, including Salted Caramel Chai Latte, Ovaltine Chai Shake and, of course, the obligatory-at-this-time-of-year Pumpkin Spice Chai Latte.
Being the unadventurous soul that I am, I shall finish off the remainder of the teabags in a standard hot-water-and-a-splash-of-milk fashion without adding caramel or pumpkin syrup or the like. I won’t be replenishing the supply once it’s gone.
Twinings Spicy Chai was ever so slightly cheaper than my regular Tea India Masala Chai, but it does have a far more limited spice selection. Two spices is not enough different spices. Not when Tea India manage to pack seven into their brew. And ‘flavourings’? In a masala chai? Oh come on, Twinings, you’ve got a whole spice rack of entirely natural ingredients to choose from here; there really isn’t any need for that.
That said, this tea was a perfectly pleasant experience, and I did rather enjoy it. Even if I didn’t recreate the full 300-calorie Starbucks Chai Latte experience with it.
Today’s book pairing is Flashman and the Mountain of Light by George MacDonald Fraser.
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