The Ratio To Follow When Drinking Black Tea With Milk

With the popularity of boba milk tea surging, more and more people are adding milk to their teas. It's a practice common in the United Kingdom, and stems back centuries, starting in Asia. While black tea is enjoyable on its own, adding a little milk changes the texture and enhances the drink with creaminess. If you're wondering what a good ratio to follow is when drinking black tea with milk at home, we've got the answer for you — one part milk or cream and three parts black tea.

While we feel this is a pretty solid and golden ratio to follow, in the end, how much milk, evaporated milk, cream, or creamer you add to your teas really depends on your palate. First, always taste your tea since there are so many different types of tea with varying strengths and intensities. If the black tea is very strong, splashing in a bit more milk is warranted. However, if your tea is light in flavor, you may want to add less milk so you retain more tea flavor when you drink it. Adding too much milk will dilute the tea's natural flavors. 

But let's say you're using plant-based milk, rather than dairy milk. This will change our ratio a bit, since plant-based milks are usually a bit more watery and to achieve the same level of creaminess as dairy milk and cream, you may need to add a splash more of plant-based milk, like oat, almond, and soy, into tea. 

If you're making iced milk tea, we recommend following the same ratio of 1 part milk to 3 parts tea. Just note that the ice may dilute the tea as it melts, so you may want to try adding less milk next time if you find the tea's flavor too light.  

With strong black teas, like Assam black tea (commonly used to make Thai tea and Indian chai), you may find yourself needing to add more milk to the brew. In fact, we often use more milk when we are making chai, like our maple chai recipe, where we use 2 cups of whole milk to ½ cup of water and our oat milk chai latte recipe, where we use more oat milk than water to make the drink. 

When making our refreshing Thai iced tea recipe, we add both cream and sweetened condensed milk to balance the strong flavors of the black tea. So again, while we do have a perfect ratio for you to follow when drinking black tea with milk, what matters most is what your taste buds prefer and the type of drink you're crafting.