Why Gujarat drinks the strongest chai: Morbi, kadak tea and 80 years of blending

Kadak translates as strong, firm, hard. Applied to chai it means a brew with deep reddish-brown colour, a brisk bite you can taste through milk and sugar, and enough body that the cup does not feel watery. It is not bitterness — a badly made strong tea is harsh; a good kadak chai is strong and smooth at once.

The technique is as important as the leaf. Gujarati chai is boiled, not steeped: tea, water, milk and sugar go into the pan together or in quick succession and are brought to a rolling boil, often more than once. Only a tea with dense, fast-releasing granules holds up to that treatment.

Gujarat is a dairy state — the milk cooperatives that made the country’s dairy revolution are here — so milk is generous in the cup, and a tea that cannot cut through milk is pointless. Add a sweet tooth and a long working day, and the cup becomes small, strong and frequent rather than large and mild.

Chai here is hospitality. It is the first thing offered to a guest, a customer or a visitor to an office, and refusing it is difficult. Roadside tea stalls — the “kitli” — are where deals are discussed and news exchanged. A brand that becomes the household tea in a Gujarati town is trusted in a way advertising cannot buy.

Orthodox tea — whole or broken leaf, rolled rather than cut — releases its character slowly and rewards gentle steeping in water. Boil it with milk and most of its aroma is lost while the body stays thin. CTC granules, with far more surface area, give up colour and strength in the first minute and keep a malty backbone all the way through milk and sugar.

That is why Gujarat, and every milk-tea market that drinks like Gujarat, runs on Assam CTC: the Gulf’s karak, Central Asian milk tea, East African chai. When a buyer from one of those markets asks for “Gujarati-style” tea, they are asking for a dense CTC blend, graded and tasted for kadak strength, not for a lighter leaf with a nicer name.

Morbi sits in Saurashtra, western Gujarat, a few hours by road from the ports of Mundra and Kandla. It is an industrial town — the country’s ceramic-tile capital, with a long history in clocks and engineering — where factories keep long hours. Tea is fuel here, poured in small cups many times a day.

It is also where Narsibapa Tea started. The family’s shop still stands in Para Bazar near Nehru Gate Chowk, where Patel Narsi Ratanji & Sons began selling tea generations ago. In Morbi, a great deal of the chai poured over the last eighty years has been ours — and the saffron pack became a fixture in local kitchens for one reason: it tastes the same every time.

The family business dates from the 1940s and is now in its fourth generation. The tools have changed: leaf is graded and blended at a GIDC plant on Sanala Road, sealed for freshness and packed into 250 g, 500 g and 1 kg retail packs and export cartons under an FSSAI licence. A Premium 500 g blend sits alongside the classic saffron pack.

What has not changed is the test. Every batch is brewed and tasted before it is sealed — with milk, the way Morbi drinks it. Nothing carries the Narsibapa name until the family would drink it too. Consistency across seasons, gardens and years is the whole craft; a blend that is excellent once and different next month is worth little to a household or an importer.

For an importer or distributor, a blend built for the Gujarati cup brings three practical advantages. Cup yield: a dense, strong blend makes more cups per kilo at the strength milk-tea drinkers expect, which is how your customers judge value. Resilience: a tea designed to be boiled with milk forgives the hurried brewing of a busy café or roadside stall. And an audience: Gujarati and wider Indian communities abroad know exactly what kadak chai should taste like and look for a pack that delivers it.

When you sample, brew it kadak — boiled, with milk and sugar — and compare it with what you sell today. That cup, not the offer sheet, tells you whether a blend belongs in your market.