Does Chai Have Caffeine?

Yes. Chai is black tea brewed with spices, and all of its caffeine comes from the tea: about 47 mg in an 8-ounce cup, going by USDA figures for brewed black tea, against about 95 mg for the same cup of drip coffee. So a mug of chai is roughly half a coffee. The cinnamon, cardamom, ginger and clove add flavor and no caffeine at all.

For making it at home, start with a box of Twinings Chai: plain black tea and the classic spices, each bag wrapped, about 16 cents a cup. If you want a chai after dinner, buy Numi's Rooibos Chai instead. It's made from rooibos, a red bush from South Africa, and has no caffeine to take out. Either way you get a warm, fragrant mug with a gentler lift than coffee, and it smells like a spice drawer before you've had a sip. Pour in milk and the tea turns round and creamy under the ginger; a spoon of honey and it's the drink you want once the evenings get cold.

How much caffeine is in chai, cup by cup

How you make it moves the number more than which brand you buy. Here are the figures, with where each one comes from.

The USDA lists caffeine per 100 grams (20 mg for black tea, 40 mg for coffee). I converted them to 8-ounce cups.

The Starbucks line is the one people don't expect. A grande is twice the size of a home cup and has only slightly more caffeine, because half of it is steamed milk. The caffeine sits in the chai concentrate, so a bigger cup mostly means more milk. By my math, 55 mg over 16 ounces comes to about 27 mg per 8 ounces, a bit over half a plain cup of black tea.

What the grande has plenty of is sugar: Starbucks lists 200 calories and 31 grams of sugars. If you're watching one number at 3 p.m., that's the bigger one.

Chai latte vs coffee

Compare the cups you actually drink. A grande chai latte at 55 mg has less caffeine than one 8-ounce drip coffee, and far less than a large one. The FDA's reference for healthy adults is 400 mg a day, which it puts at about two to three 12-ounce cups of coffee. Three grande chai lattes still come in under half of that.

A dirty chai changes everything. It's a chai latte with a shot of espresso in it, so you're drinking the coffee's caffeine on top of the tea's. Oregon Chai suggests it on its own listing, and it's easy to make at home: one Twinings owner pours it over espresso every morning, coffee and tea in one mug.

The supermarket cartons are where you lose track. The Tazo Classic listing warns that the drink is high in caffeine and not recommended for children or pregnant women, and gives no milligrams. Oregon Chai lists organic black tea and no caffeine figure either. Both tell you to mix one part concentrate with one part milk, so your latte has half of whatever is in the carton, a number neither brand prints.

What you do get from Oregon Chai is a lot of sweetness. One owner drinks it instead of coffee because it's less jittery, and says the iced latte tastes like sweet pumpkin pie, not far from the Starbucks one. It was also too sweet for every day, and adding more milk to calm the sugar took some of the spice away with it. Another mixes it half and half with soy milk over crushed ice and keeps the opened carton in the fridge for ten days without it going off.

If you're comparing chai with other teas rather than with coffee, matcha is the odd one out, because you drink the powdered leaf itself. What matcha is made of explains why that changes the math.

Steep it longer, get more

The easiest way to change the caffeine in your cup is the clock. In a 2008 study in the Journal of Analytical Toxicology, Chin and colleagues brewed twenty store-bought teas for one, three and five minutes and found 14 to 61 mg per 6- or 8-ounce serving. How long the tea steeped mattered; whether it was white, green or black showed no clear pattern. The same bag can land low or high depending on when you pull it.

The boxes give you a window. Twinings says three to five minutes in boiling water. VAHDAM says one bag in 200 ml of just-boiled water for three to five minutes. Stash says one to three minutes for its decaf chai. For a gentler afternoon cup, pull the bag at three minutes instead of forgetting it on the counter.

The number of bags counts too. One Twinings owner finds the spice light and uses two or three bags for a big mug to get a stronger chai. That works, and it also doubles or triples the tea, so the caffeine goes up with it. If you want more spice without more tea, a pinch of your own cinnamon or cardamom does it for free.

Stovetop masala chai, where the leaves simmer in a pan with milk and spices, is a long steep, so I'd expect it near the top of that range, well above a café latte.

Decaf chai and caffeine-free chai are not the same thing

Decaf chai still starts with black tea; most of the caffeine has been taken out. Stash says its decaf is processed with carbon dioxide and keeps about 2 to 6 percent of the original caffeine. The USDA puts brewed decaf black tea at about 2 mg per 8-ounce cup, and in the 2008 study every decaf tea came in under 12 mg per serving. That won't matter to most people, but it isn't zero if a doctor has told you to cut caffeine completely.

Decaf also keeps the taste of tea. One Stash owner loves Iraqi chai but has to limit caffeine; the decaf isn't the same, but it's full of flavor and has the cardamom that's so hard to find in a bag. Another brews it very strong at night, lets it cool, and pours it over ice with almond milk in the morning.

Caffeine-free chai has no tea in it at all. Numi's Rooibos Chai is rooibos with cloves, cinnamon, ginger, allspice, nutmeg and cardamom, and the 2008 study found no caffeine in any of the herbal teas it measured. It's also hard to over-steep: Numi asks for five to six minutes, a time that would push a black tea to the top of its range.

For lattes, Tazo Decaf sits in between. It uses decaf black tea with rooibos and chicory root, so you still taste tea. One owner adds a pinch of nutmeg and cinnamon and can't tell it from the regular carton. Another makes it a fall habit, in the morning on no-caffeine days and again at night before bed, and wishes an open carton lasted longer than the seven days it's good for.

If your household drinks every kind of tea, the best tea brands goes wider than chai.

Twinings ChaiBlack tea with cinnamon, cardamom, cloves and ginger, each bag wrapped, at about 16 cents a cup. Mild enough that some people use two bags for a big mug.

Check price on Amazon$16.18 as of 9:52 AM ET

Start here because it's simply black tea and four spices, so every number in this guide applies to it, and 100 bags for about $16 makes the everyday cup cheap. The flavor is on the gentle side: people who drink it plain or with a little honey call it smooth and comforting, and one owner's wife makes her chai lattes with it. If you like your chai loud with spice, steep it the full five minutes or add your own. Three minutes gives you a softer afternoon cup from the same box.

Numi Rooibos ChaiRooibos and six spices, no tea leaf at all, so there's no caffeine to begin with and you can steep it as long as you like.

Check price on Amazon$5.96 as of 9:52 AM ET

For the cup after dinner I'd pick rooibos over decaf, because there was never any caffeine to remove. At about $6 for 18 bags it costs about twice as much per cup as Twinings. I'd keep a box next to the Twinings and reach for it once the sun goes down.

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