How much chai patti per cup, and what a cup actually costs

One level teaspoon per cup, which is about 2 to 2.5 grams. That makes roughly 400 to 500 cups from a kilo, or 100 to 125 cups from a 250g pack. If your chai is weak, the fix is almost never more patti. It is usually too short a boil in plain water before the milk goes in.

This is the question we get asked most often across the counter, and the honest answer is that most people are already using enough tea. What they are short of is the right method, and adding more patti to fix a method problem makes the cup bitter rather than strong.

How much chai patti per cup?

One level teaspoon per cup. A level teaspoon of CTC granules weighs about 2 to 2.5 grams, which is the dose the whole Indian chai tradition settled on long before anyone was weighing it.

If you like it properly kadak, go to a heaped teaspoon, around 3 grams. Past that you are not making it stronger, you are making it astringent, which is a different thing and not a nicer one.

How many cups do you get from a pack?

At 2.5 grams per cup, which is the safe figure to plan with:

Those are cups, not pots. If you make chai for four in one pot you are using four teaspoons, and the pack goes four times as fast.

The numbers

Cups per pack, at 2.5g per cup

Pack	Cups	Lasts a two-cup household
100g	40	About 3 weeks
250g	100	About 7 weeks
500g	200	About 3 months
1kg	400	About 7 months

What does the tea in a cup of chai actually cost?

Less than almost anyone guesses, and the useful number is not the one printed on the pack.

A kilo makes 400 to 500 cups. So the entire spread between the cheapest chai patti on the shelf and the best one you can buy works out at roughly forty to fifty paise a cup.

Forty paise, twice a day, is about twenty five rupees a month. That is the whole financial consequence of buying the better tea, set against something you taste every single morning. Put it beside the milk, which at half a cup per serving costs several times what the tea does, or beside a shop cup at ₹15 to ₹20, and it stops looking like a decision worth economising on.

There is a catch running the other way, too, and the trade knows it well. A thin tea gets dosed heavier to make up for what is not in it. You buy it cheaper and then use more of it, which is how a cheaper kilo quietly becomes a dearer cup.

Why does my chai taste weak even with enough patti?

Because of when the milk went in. This is the single most common mistake and it has nothing to do with quantity.

CTC granules need to open in plain boiling water. Milk coats the leaf and blunts the extraction, so tea that goes into milk from the start never gives up its colour or its strength, however much of it you use.

The order that works:

1. Half a cup of water in the pot with the tea. Bring it to a hard boil and leave it there a full minute. The water should go dark before anything else happens.
2. Add half a cup of full-fat milk and the sugar.
3. Boil two to three minutes more, until the colour turns a deep reddish brown.
4. Strain and drink it hot. CTC chai does not hold once it cools.

Get that order right and you will probably find you can use slightly less tea than you were using, not more.

Does the dose change with more milk?

Yes. If you take your chai milky, closer to two parts milk to one of water, go up to a heaped teaspoon. Milk is not just diluting the tea, it is binding to the compounds that carry the briskness, so a milkier cup genuinely needs more leaf to taste the same.

Buffalo milk needs more again. It is richer than cow’s milk and it will flatten a standard dose.

The short version

• One level teaspoon, 2 to 2.5g, per cup
• Heaped, about 3g, for kadak or for a milky cup
• 400 to 500 cups per kilo
• Under two rupees of tea in a cup, at any sensible kilo price
• If it tastes weak, boil it in plain water longer before the milk goes in