THE MANIFESTO

There is a chai that tastes like the mountains. Cold air, a small fire, cardamom so fresh it is almost sharp. You drink it standing up. Sitting feels wrong at that altitude.

There is a chai that tastes like a Tuesday morning in a city of twenty million people. Milky, sweet, quick. The chai-wala pours it before you have finished asking. He already knew. The ginger in it has been doing something specific for a very long time — warming from the inside out, the way it has been understood to do in a medical tradition that was already ancient when Europe was still learning to boil water.

There is a chai that tastes like coming home. You cannot always say which home. Or when.

These are not the same drink. They share a name the way a family shares one — the connection is real, but every member grew up somewhere different, shaped by different soil and different hands. Kashmir is not Kerala. The Western Ghats are not the Gangetic plains. The spices that grow in each place end up in the cup. And the cup tastes like where it came from.

That is not poetry. That is just geography.

We have spent twelve years learning to read it. Not from books. At roadside stalls and in mountain villages, in the kitchens of people who learned from their mothers, who learned from theirs. The kitchen we built in Delhi holds close to 180 of those ingredients. Each one arrived with a story.

Some of that knowledge is ancient. Some of it is being rediscovered by food science. Most of it, the chai-wala already knew.

What we are bringing to Berlin is not a recipe. It is a point of view — about what chai is, what it carries, and what it has always understood about the relationship between what you eat and how you feel and the particular moment you are in.

Europe has been drinking an approximation.

We thought it was time.

THE JOURNEY — TIMELINE LABELS

2013 A pushcart, hand-built from discarded wood. Wheeled into a crafts fair in Delhi with a collection of teas and spices and no plan beyond the next cup. The market said yes.

Champa Gali Our first permanent home. We built it ourselves — reclaimed glass, salvaged bricks, pallet wood, sustainable pine. The design followed the materials. It has been our kitchen, our lab, our café, and our cultural space ever since.

Ahmedabad A year-long residency. A new city, a different audience, honest learning.

Red Fort · 2023–25 Fifteen months at one of India’s most significant heritage sites, in partnership with IGNCA — the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, under India’s Ministry of Culture. We focused on GI-tagged ingredients and the traditional foods of India. The project is over. What it taught us is not.

Berlin · Now The European chapter has begun. We are here. And we are making chai.

THE LONDON MOMENT — CAPTION

Years before Berlin, there was London. Piccadilly Circus. Changing metro lines. Staring at an empty shopfront. The thought arrived quietly — chai is not understood here. Someone ought to fix it. It turned out that someone would have to be me.

BERLIN VISION

We did not come to Berlin to open a shop. We came to begin something — a European conversation about chai, rooted in this city, built from this kitchen, taken to a new city every summer.

Berlin is our home. From here, we run our lab, our production kitchen, our café, our event space. And from here, every June through October, we take the Jugmug Thela residency somewhere it has not been before. A new city. A new audience. The same chai, in a new room.

We have practised this. The cart, Champa Gali, Ahmedabad, the Red Fort. We have always moved this way — arriving with intention, staying long enough to matter.

PAGE SIGNPOSTS

Our World The spaces that built us, and the projects that gave us something to stand on.

The Chai What chai actually is. And what we are bringing to Europe.

Who We Are The values this brand was built on, long before it was a brand.

The Berlin Residency What we are doing here this summer. And how you can be part of it.