Chai
Made in a pot, not a pump bottle
Boiled properly, poured hot, handed straight over. In summer it comes iced, in limited batches — and then it is gone.
Chai · Community · Music · 13 pop-ups and counting
Where people meet. A chai pop-up in Fresno, CA and surrounding areas.
Next pop-up
Announced soon
Roughly one a month, somewhere different every time.
Dates go up on @hattijattdi first
hatti noun ਹੱਟੀ ਜੱਟ ਦੀ — a small shop, the kind everybody ends up at. Ours pours chai.
01
What it is
Three things, and the third one surprises people.
Community
The whole reason for the thing
The small corner shop everybody ends up at. Ours has no fixed address, so it borrows a room for a few hours at a time.
Music
Somebody is always on the aux
There is a speaker at every pop-up, and on a rooftop in December there were live DJs. It is not background music.
02
The chai
Chai is a tea drink with spice in it. Not the other way round.
Most of what gets sold as chai is a syrup with a flavour name on it. This is the other thing — cooked in a pot, poured hot, finished in four minutes because you are standing up.
The tea
CTC, not loose leaf
Looks like gravel and gives everything up fast. Delicate leaf goes thin and grassy in boiling milk.
The spice
Whole until it is needed
Cardamom stops being cardamom a month after grinding. Whole pods keep; jarred powder has given up.
The order
Water, then milk
Tea boils hard in water before any milk arrives. Skip it and you have made milk that has met tea.
The pour
From a height
From a height, on purpose. It aerates, cools it to drinkable, and looks good — which is not nothing.
In summer there is iced chai, made in limited batches. The August pop-up ran out. The whole method
03
Where to find us
There is no address. There is a date.
A coffee lab, a brewery, a rooftop in December with live DJs. If you run somewhere in Fresno and want a pot of chai in it for an afternoon, come and say so.
Alchemist Coffee Lab
· 4:00 – 6:00pm
Limited batch iced chai.
1306 N Wishon Ave, Fresno, CA 93728
Procreations Brewing Company
· 10:00am – 2:00pm
Fresno, CA
Quail State Rooftop
· 10:00am – 2:00pm
Chai in the Sky — hot chai, live DJs, chai hard martini.
Fresno, CA · Hosted by Yaardico
Tower Haus
· 10:00am – 1:00pm
Chai, community, music. Indian food and sweets.
Fresno, CA
House Party No. 1
· From 10:00am
Unlimited refills and questionable gossip.
Fresno, CA · Hosted by Yaardico
Before these
8 more
Roughly one a month
04
From the journal
Opinions, mostly about milk.
- Method The milk argument, settled Milk at the start or milk at the end. One of these makes chai and the other makes tea with milk in it. 4 min
- Ingredients Why your cardamom tastes like nothing It was probably ground in a different calendar year. Here is the shelf-life problem nobody mentions. 3 min
- Objects A field guide to the cutting glass Why the small glass exists, what "cutting" actually means, and why your mug is working against you. 3 min
See you at the next one.
. Roughly one a month, somewhere different every time.
Roughly one a month, somewhere different every time. The next date goes up on Instagram first.
ਹੱਟੀ ਜੱਟ ਦੀ