Chai sweet pleasure and caffeine by Jon Horne 2001 © Touch Nottingham (internet magazine and What's On guide) I have a confession to make: I don't like coffee. Can't stand the stuff. One whiff of a percolator in action, and the smell hangs like smog in my nostrils for hours. A couple of drops of someone else's coffee on my sugar spoon, and my tea tastes like it was strained through cat litter. Yes, I am exaggerating, but this whole coffee business puts me on the defensive. It's like being teetotal: you feel you have to justify yourself. Coffee bars are springing up all over the place. Nottingham is already reaching saturation point, as every dark alley now seems to contain at least one (last year it was wine bars - these things go in cycles). This has happened before, of course (think of the coffee bar boom of the late 1950s - 'Absolute Beginners' and all that). In the past, coffee bars have gone out of fashion as quickly as they came in, and gone bust in due course. However, this time it's corporate. In addition to Costa, now we've got Starbucks moving in - to a city near you, and soon enough to a small town near you. A multinational corporation won't be put out of business by a temporary slump in sales, so the coffee bar is here to stay. Another confession: the coffee bar thing is horribly attractive to me. Not only do the infernal places reek of coffee, they also reek of cool. The concept is European without being French; American without the obesity and ignorance; a slice of Mediterranean culture whose natural home is not by the Mediterranean Sea, but in the urban purple haze of Amsterdam and Berlin. Coffee bars owe their very existence to Youth. In 1950s Soho, hipsters too young to grow a goatee were also too young to get into pubs - and so they got wired to the gills on espresso and went crazy-man-crazy at the 2-I's, where geeky was where it was at; where Hank Marvin and a red Stratocaster were homoeroticism personified. In late 1980s Seattle, the slacker outsiders, too awkward to fit into the regimented American social structure of jocks and cheerleaders, but so cool that they didn't even notice when they were being beaten up, met in coffee bars (because of the absurd US legal drinking age, which didn't allow even those who could grow a goatee into a proper bar) to wear check shirts and ripped jeans, smoke generic non-filters and invent grunge. Even without the automatic cool that comes from youth (and youth was something which happened to this writer a long time ago, in the sort of place where it was regarded as an embarrassing interlude between childhood and middle-age), coffee bars are the sort of places where drinks are sipped rather than sloshed down, where you can read the Guardian without looking like a poseur, and where you can't help feeling as if you are about to meet someone vastly more interesting than yourself - even if this never happens (because everyone in the joint is hoping to meet someone more interesting than him/herself). All of which is a bit of a non-starter if you don't like coffee. Oh sure, they serve tea. But have you ever asked for tea in a coffee bar? Even if you ask for something weird in the Twinings rack, you still end up feeling like you've been mistaken for Ann Widdecombe. Move over, middle England, we sell coffee here. Well, now there's an alternative. Chai may not be the new rock 'n' roll, but it could soon be the new Lapsang Souchong. Chai is a curious drink; one feels that there should be alcohol in it. Full of sugar, cinnamon and nutmeg, it has a celebratory quality that I would normally associate with mulled wine and Christmas pudding. Most importantly though, you can ask for it in a coffee bar, and get a drink that looks like a caffe latte, is sufficiently exotic to mark you out from those who are too staid for Real Coffee, and which even comes in a glass with a long spoon if you ask for one. If I'm being brutally honest, it's not unlike Ovaltine. But no one else needs to know that. It looks great, tastes great, and there's enough spice in it to have a good sniff before you drink, and let it fight away the lingering odour of coffee beans being ground up. And it is genuinely exotic. Etymologically speaking, chai is just another word for tea - as it still is in India and Russia (hence a 'cup of char'). But the drink itself, like coffee, is Middle-Eastern.The spices are there because in places like Turkey and Iran, the milk's already going off by the time you've extracted it from the cow. The first time I drank chai, it was given to me by a vegan, who admitted that it was the only way to make the horrible soya-extract, which they refer to as 'milk', into something drinkable. In the Turkish kebab houses of Berlin (okay, I am showing off, but that's the point: chai is cool, daddi-o), you either have syrupy coffee with your food, or else you have chai. Some people have both. The chai comes out of a decidedly ethnic-looking cauldron, is a slightly disturbing browny-grey colour, has unidentified chunks of vegetable matter in it (which I suspect are bits of ginger) and is gorgeous. The stuff that we're starting to get here is not the real Turkish McCoy. There are no bits, and (in Starbucks at least) it comes out of a packet. This is the way it's going to go - it is, after all, being marketed as an alternative to coffee, rather than as an accompaniment to a large doner with extra chilli-lemon. The best chai I've had in Nottingham is from the Cafe Romano, in the alley opposite the old Odeon. That said, they overdid the froth, and so it wasn't quite hot enough. Nice spices though. Packets of chai mix can be bought from Starbucks for now, but it won't be long before the supermarkets start stocking it. (Note: Don't be fooled by Lipton's Tchae - the one which they're selling with the annoying - and fairly racist - advert featuring a Buddhist monk. That is a marketing strategy for selling Japanese green tea, which is nothing like chai.) Before such time as Asda's gets the hint, if you care to try making chai at home: brew a pot of tea (ordinary tea is fine - Earl Grey or Lapsang will just confuse your taste buds), add a bucket of milk, and then throw in the entire contents of your spice rack. Treat the process with the solemnity with which a coffee-freak treats a cup of ground coffee. DO NOT let it boil. Fine as chai is, it will never have the heroin-chic kudos of a cup of espresso. Very strong tea will always be associated with egg and bacon in a seaside guest-house, and that's never going to be cool. Instead, think of it in latte/mocha terms - slightly camp, very foreign, and a source of pure sweet pleasure with just a nudge of caffeine. Never mind a drink, that sounds to me like a way to live your life. - - - read more rants and raves