Your Own Custom Chai Tiffen
Back Story
I love chai.
It all started in 2010 when I began working for Groupon as one of their first employees in the new Palo Alto, CA office. We had a rickety space above some retail shops on the quaint California Avenue and it was tons of fun.
The office was just down the street from a running store called Zombie Runner that also had an espresso stand inside. This was some of the best coffee I'd ever had. The owner of Zombie Runner, Don, was an espresso afficionado and took his product seriously. Every barista that worked for him was one of the best ever.
One day I branched out from my usual latte or cappucino and decided to give their chai a try.
Oh. My. Goodness.
This was something special! I had never had such a delicious and spicy cup of chai, and this became my new favorite. Things got so that if I showed up in line on a busy day, Don or one of his baristas might just put my chai at the end of the counter and just put it on my tab. I guess I was a regular. :)
Weekends were difficult because I didn't have my chai. I asked Don if he could sell me some of the mix he used to make his. He was interested in the request but wanted to make a real product out of it. It took almost a year, but he eventually started selling it on its own.
I left that job in 2014, and was happy I could keep my chai dreams alive through my periodic bulk orders of several bags of Zombie Chai at a time.
Click the image below or buy it here:
In mid-2025, there was a great chai famine in the land. I had just run out of my last 8-bag purchase, and went to the Zombie Runner site to order another batch. I was shocked to see an "Out of Stock" banner on the page.
Getting Creative
I checked back a week later and it was still out of stock, so I needed to take action.
Reading the ingredients on my last bag and examining a teaspoon of the mix at high magnification, I felt confident that I could make something roughly equivalent.
The ingredients were easy enough to find -- black tea, coarse ground dried ginger, shelled cardamom, coarse ground cinnamon, black pepper, and cloves. I found them all on Amazon.
Next up I was thinking about the mechanics of making chai each day. I could measure and pre-mix the ingredients and store them in a jar, but I would need to be confident in my ratios and wasn't sure if the ingredients would stay properly mixed. These problems let me to want to keep the ingredients separate. I wanted to keep them handy since I'd use them every day, but also protected from light. I wanted the act of making chai to feel fun and efficient, and not involve unscrewing many lids and shuffling many containers around.
Much to my delight, I remembered the traditional Indian spice tiffen or dabba that you see in most Indian kitchens. It's a stainless steel container with a lid that contains 7 smaller stainless steel bowls where you keep your most often used spices for cooking food. I've had one in the past and it's super handy.
It all came together perfectly when I realized that there were 7 dry ingredients in making chai -- tea, sugar, ginger, cinnamon, cardamom, cloves, and black pepper.
So here's my recipe for making the perfect cup of spicy chai. The beauty of this approach is you can customize every single cup. Maybe you don't want to use any tea (double the ginger and it's delicious). Maybe you have a friend that can't handle any spice. It's your world!
Amazon List
If you want to order all of these things at once, here's an Amazon List with everything. Chai Dabba Amazon List
My Recipe
Here is my typical recipe:
Put your chosen small pot on a scale and zero it out.
Put 6oz of water in the pot
Put 8oz of milk in the pot. My current favorite is Silk Original Oatmilk.
Add a teaspoon of black tea. I use decaf.
Add a little less than a teaspoon of sugar.
Add a heaping teaspoon of ginger.
Add several cardamom seeds.
Add a little less than a quarter teaspoon of black pepper.
Add a quarter teaspoon of cinnamon.
Add several whole cloves.
Everyone gets to know one another in the pot.
Maybe drop in a star anise pod if you're feeling like it's a special day.
Weigh the pot with everything in it. In my case, the pot weighs about 46oz at the beginning.
Bring to a low low boil. It's done when 3-4oz of water has boiled off. In my case that is somewhere between 42-43oz.
Pour into your mug through a strainer and enjoy!