KEVIN
THE CHAI GUY
Meet Kevin. He's known as the chai guy. He was born and raised in Sri Lanka where chai was about as vital to one's wellbeing as air and where the idea of anything instant was completely foreign.
Each day started much the same for him and his family. They would buy their spices at the marketplace from stall owners they had formed budding relationships with. When they returned home, they would crush the spices in a mortar and pestle, add the ingredients to the pot in a particular order and wait patiently as the tea came to a boil. When the chai was poured, Kevin's father would open the newspaper and the two would enjoy a quiet cup together.
"I had the best cup of tea every day of my life," Kevin said.
When he was twelve, his family relocated to Oman, and a few years later, Kevin moved to America. Separated from his family, he longed for a sense of home and familiarity, so he continued to make chai to remember his roots.
Those around him came to know him for his chai. People would come to his house for it and when he went to others' he would be asked to make it. Each person who received a cup would hold it close and inhale the aroma of freshly brewed spices. A lengthy "ooh," "aah," or "mmm' would follow and after their first sip either their eyes would widen, or with pressed lips they would nod in approval of the fruits of Kevin's labour.
If you want to know the secrets behind Kevin's chai, he'll make sure you first know two things.
The first is that you're worth far more than any tea bag, instant powder, or Starbucks concentrate. Make it from scratch. It's worth the journey. Convenience is not your greatest ally when it comes to chai. The second is that you don't ever want to say 'chai tea.' Chai means tea. So when you're saying you want a chai tea, you're literally saying, 'I want a tea tea."
Kevin still makes his chai much the same way his mother and grandmother demonstrated: slowly and with close attention.
"Watch and learn," they would say to him as a young boy as he stood and waited for his morning brew. Chai required time, attention and effort. The process was just as important as the product.
While I'm about to give a summary of his daily tea ritual, you should know he mixes things up every now and then. Sometimes he goes for chocolate chai, sometimes decaf, sometimes he grates his ginger, other times he leaves it out. But for the most part, he sticks to a series of what he refers to as “tea-chniques.”
His process looks a little something like this:
He cuts a small piece of ginger, cleans the skin off with a spoon or a knife and crushes it in the mortar and pestle until it is almost the consistency of a paste.
He adds 2/3 milk and 1/3 water to a pot. He likes oat milk for the fat content.
He gets a ladle and stirs the milk.
He adds the ginger to season the milk before the spices go in.
He puts whole spices into the mortar and pestle: cloves, star anise, cardamom, cinnamon, bark, nutmeg and peppercorn when he's feeling like spice in his life.
He breaks the larger items using vertical motions and crushes them by grinding in circular motions. The crushing he says is hard, but the longer you do it, the better the flavour will be.
He waits for the milk and ginger to simmer.
He adds the spices. Then the black tea. Then a spoonful of sugar.
He stirs in a circular motion until he creates a whirlpool.
He lifts the cauldron from the comfort of the flame once the spices start to dance. He notes that the rolling boil is an important part of the process. If you take the chai off before it almost boils over, you will miss the flavour. But if it boils over you will overheat it. "The spices are sensitive," he says. "Take care."
He stirs it some more off the flame. This helps to enhance the flavours.
He places the pot back on the flame, reduces the heat, and waits until the chai is light brown in colour.
He aerates the chai by standing in a steady posture and pouring it from one jug to another.
He strains it.
He pours it into a mug with a thin lip.
"The whole process is a feast of attention," Kevin said. "I find joy in grinding the spices, in smelling them as they're crushed, in waiting for the milk to boil."
While this ritual has in many ways remained the same — a remembrance of his family — it has evolved to represent something more. Each cup is loaded with meaning that conjures up memories of rest, quiet and thinking.
When Kevin moved to America, he adopted a different pace of life. He went from a culture that moved slowly and did things from scratch to a culture of "now", full of quick and empty alternatives. His life became busier and more hurried than ever before and chai became an especially needed break from his schedule.
"One of the effects of a culture obsessed with efficiency is that we have lost the things that help give meaning to life. Things like hardship and struggle versus convenience and comfort," he said.
As is his experience with making chai, the actual grind of doing something from scratch, the more invested one is in the process, the more one will enjoy the end product.
In an essay titled 'The Tyranny of Convenience,’ writer Tim Wu says, "Convenience is all destination and no journey. But climbing a mountain is different from taking the tram to the top, even if you end up at the same place. We are becoming people who care mainly or only about outcomes… An unwelcome consequence of living in a world where everything is "easy" is that the only skill that matters is the ability to multitask. We need to consciously embrace the inconvenient — not always, but more of the time."
For Kevin, the magic of chai is in its slow, inefficient process. It takes time, but that's precisely the point.
Day after day he immerses himself in the thirty-plus minute experience, which could very easily be reduced to two. Then, like his father, he sits down and unfolds the paper. He could get it mediated through the rectangle in his hand — it would be the most efficient way to do so — but he still has a paper subscription. Like the crushing of spices for his chai, the cumbersome experience of flipping through pages and the faint smell of dried printer ink, have emerged into what Rabbi Heschel refers to as a "palace in time."
In the words of Kevin, "It's a respite free from the demons of demand, a weekly reminder that I don't have to sacrifice meaning at the altar of efficiency."
So as he and his family sit on opposite sides of the world, sipping tea in remembrance of each other, he invites us to do the same. To slow down, to fill our lives with the fragrance of fresh spices, and to remind ourselves of the joy that comes from not always doing what is easiest.
And that, my friends, is Kevin. He gets a badge for resisting the convenient and choosing the slow way to make chai.