How to brew the perfect Kenyan chai

There is the chai you have had in cafés. Then there is the chai my mother makes. The difference is not a recipe; it is patience, and one specific kind of milk, and a refusal to rush the part of the process that looks like waiting and is actually the work.

For two cups: full-fat cow's milk, three hundred millilitres. Water, two hundred millilitres. Three black tea bags or two tablespoons of loose Kericho. Two green cardamom pods. A thumb of fresh ginger. Sugar to taste, added last. Do not substitute the milk; nothing in this universe will save chai made with skim.

Bring the water and the milk to a near-boil together, not separately. The mistake everyone makes is boiling them apart and combining them at the end; the chai then tastes layered instead of woven, and the milk skin sits on top like an apology.

Crush the cardamom under the flat of a knife until the pods split. Smash the ginger the same way; do not slice it. Drop both into the pot. Lower the heat until the surface trembles but does not break, and let the spices sit there for two full minutes before you add a single leaf of tea.

Now the tea. Stir it in once, then leave it. The tea should steep at just-below-boil for four minutes, no more. Boil it and the tannins come out and the chai goes bitter; under-steep it and the chai tastes thin and surprised, like it expected to be something else.

Strain into cups already warmed with hot water. Add the sugar at the cup, not the pot — different people want different sweetness, and this is the single thing that every café gets wrong and that ruins more chai in this country than any other mistake.

Drink it slowly. Anyone who finishes a cup of well-made chai quickly has either never had real chai or is in a worse mood than they are willing to admit, and either way the chai will forgive them, which is the other thing about chai that the cafés do not understand.