Cha yen from ChaTraMue mix, dialed back from the café default. A full street-vendor cha yen runs ~45g sugar a glass — more than a can of Coke — from granulated sugar and sweetened condensed milk both in the base. This drops the granulated sugar entirely and lets condensed milk do double duty (sweet + creamy), so the malty, vanilla-forward tea actually shows. Less sweet, still rich — not gutted.

Ingredients

   
30g Thai tea mix (ChaTraMue “Number One” brand)
480g water, just off the boil
50g sweetened condensed milk
80g evaporated milk
  ice

Steps

  1. Bring the water to a boil, add the Thai tea mix, and steep 5 minutes off the heat (or simmer 3–4 minutes for a stronger, more traditional brew). Brew it strong — the milk and ice both dilute it.

  2. Strain through a fine sieve lined with cheesecloth or a cloth filter; the mix is dust-fine, so a plain strainer lets the fines through. Pass it twice for a clean, deep-orange tea.

  3. While hot, stir the sweetened condensed milk into the tea until dissolved. Taste — it should read pleasantly sweet but tea-forward, not dessert-sweet. Add 5–10g more condensed milk if you want it sweeter.

  4. Cool to room temperature (or refrigerate). Fill two glasses with ice and divide the tea between them.

  5. Float the evaporated milk over the top — pour it slowly over the back of a spoon for the classic two-tone layer. Stir before drinking.

Notes

  • Use real ChaTraMue mix (the orange “Number One” bag), not plain black tea. The blend is Assam (“red tea”) dust + vanilla-forward flavoring + FD&C Yellow #6 dye — the malty body, the vanilla note, and the signature orange all come from the mix. Plain black tea tastes wrong and brews flat brown.
  • Why no granulated sugar. Traditional cha yen has three components and they’re easy to misread: granulated sugar (sweetens the tea base), sweetened condensed milk (sweetens and adds creamy body), and evaporated milk (the unsweetened creamy float on top). That’s two sweeteners + one creamer — authentic, but it’s the heaviest “street-vendor” build, ~45g sugar/glass. The cleanest way to make it less sweet is to drop the granulated sugar and lean on condensed milk for both sweetness and richness — one fewer ingredient, and the drink stays creamy.
  • Cut sweetness, not creaminess. The easy mistake is to thin the dairy too — that gives you weak, watery tea, not a less-sweet one. Keep the dairy generous (~65g per glass here, on the lighter side of real builds) and let the sugar be the thing you cut.
  • Dial it: sweeter → +5–10g condensed milk; less sweet still → cut the condensed to ~35g and lean harder on the evaporated; least sweet → evaporated milk only, no condensed (creamy but markedly more astringent and tea-bitter — that’s the trade). Half-and-half subs 1:1 for evaporated.
  • Brew strong to survive dilution. 30g mix to 480g water (~6%) is a concentrated steep; the ice and milk knock it back. A weak brew plus less sweetener tastes thin, not “less sweet” — strength is what carries a low-sugar version.
  • Hot version: skip the ice, stir both milks into the hot tea, serve.
  • Scales as a ratio: ~6% mix-to-water, then sweeten to taste with condensed milk. The Thai Tea Canelé uses the same mix at a much stronger infusion (it has to survive a 60-minute bake).