Meet Chime: Brew Authentic Chai in 3 minutes

Making the perfect cup of coffee seems like a pretty attainable goal these days. After all, an endless supply of smart coffee makers already exists to help feed your caffeine habit. But if you’d rather kick it with something a bit more spicy and a bit less bitter in the morning (or afternoon or evening), what you really need isn’t a coffee maker — it’s a chai machine. And luckily, the folks over at Y Studios have your fix.

Meet the Chime Chai Maker, an automated chai machine that purports to deliver the perfect cup of chai every time. Because as it turns out, dunking a tea bag and adding some milk and sugar just doesn’t cut it.

As Y Studios notes, the art of making chai is also quite the science, involving boiling water, boiling milk, and “adding the right proportions of chai and masala at specific temperature and sequence.” Although you could do all of this by hand, the advances of the 21st century have made it such that it’s not necessary to do so. Instead, the Chime Chai Maker makes authentic chai just a push of a button away.

The Chime purports to dispense a cup of fresh tea in less than three minutes, and depends upon three columns to dispense the correct proportions of ingredients at specific times. There’s a control console, a water reservoir, and a brewing chamber with a removable carafe that all work together to make you your preferred beverage. The brewing chamber is encased in glass so you can actually watch as your tea is being brewed. And seeing as the machine depends upon tea pods (much like a Keurig), it’s certainly satisfying to see what is actually contained in those little packets.

For the record, the ingredients are black Assam or Darjeeling tea infused with cardamom, ginger, and masala. The pods find their way into  the tea brewing chamber to steep, and milk simmers in the carafe below. Once the tea is brewed, it’s released into the milk, and then dispensed into your waiting cup.

All the ingredients within the tea pods, also known as Chime Caps, are compostable, which makes them less environmentally unfriendly than some other similar pods. And of course, you can adjust your Chime to brew chai with your own preferred ratios of milk to tea, cup size, brew strength, and temperature, all via a  companion app. Perhaps best of all, the Chime purports to be self-cleaning so that you can have your chai and drink it, too. The Chime is currently available for pre-order beginning at $199.

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