Day Trip: Farah Jesani, One Stripe Chai Co.

Tech-consultant-turned-chai-purveyor Farah Jesani embarked on a research expedition to Portland, Oregon, in 2015, in pursuit of café ownership. But she realized that the chai she was brewing as a barista was unlike what she had growing up. “There’s so much intention behind [specialty coffee], but next to really good coffee in these shops, there was really subpar chai,” explains Jesani. “It was very apparent that a lot of the chai options out there weren’t using the right type of tea, or it was bland, or it was like a cup of sugar. It wasn’t true to the nature of chai.”

Instead of opening a café, Jesani soft-launched One Stripe Chai Co., a café-centric chai brand, and went full time with One Stripe in 2018, eventually expanding into DIY tea blends. We follow along on a day of research and development for the brand’s new Chai Coffee, a tea-coffee blend inspired by the flavors of popular café order dirty chai.

6:30 a.m.

When my mornings typically start depends on when my daughter, Yara, wakes up. I’ll have breakfast with her, drop her off at school, then come back and make either a cup of coffee or a cup of chai. I love our rose chai blend Gulab City on most days because it’s so light, but I also love the really good, hearty, and bold Chai Me at Home with a little bit of sugar. And then if it’s coffee, I just do a classic French press.

8:30 a.m.

I typically try to work a 15-minute walk in to get my day started. I’ve also started to take a very quick, five-minute cold shower to focus. Today, I’ll take some calls before I head over to the coffee-roasting facility of Yes Plz, who I’m collaborating with for the Chai Coffee blend.

10 a.m.

The first thing we do is cup some coffees with the Yes Plz team to see what stands out. We’re thinking: Could this be used in a blend? Can this be accentuated by another coffee? I’m looking for something a little more nutty, anything that wouldn’t be so sharp and overpower the black tea in the chai. The final coffee we land on is a medium-roast blend—something that doesn’t overpower the chai, but also vice versa.

11 a.m.

We sample a ton of coffee, get extremely caffeinated, and then work with a bunch of tea and spices that we’d want to use in the product. We focus on incorporating ginger, cardamom, and black pepper as a priority. Chai Coffee tastes like chai and coffee, but you don’t at any point feel like it’s one or the other. The layering of actual tea and spices is very complex and elevated. We’ve been calling it a dirty chai blend, but we try to shift, referring to it as a masala coffee blend, since we’re not trying to emulate the overly sweet dirty chais people are used to at cafés.

2 p.m.

After a few hours at their warehouse, I come back home for lunch, which is usually a poké bowl from Sweetfin or something quick at home that’s fresh and healthy. Then I’ll typically have a call to check in with our operations manager in Portland to check on inventory and any updates, or my weekly PR call to brainstorm what we’re going to email our customers and what kind of content we’re going to do. An example of something we shared was an educational piece on South Asian Heritage Month. South Asia is more than just India and Pakistan—it includes Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Iran, the Maldives, Nepal, and Sri Lanka as well. We also highlighted four South Asian food and beverage businesses that we really love, like Paro and Peepal People.

4 p.m.

We shoot a lot of photos for our social media nowadays at my house. Today I shot a lot of content of myself trying the blend sample we made earlier in a French press, so I could not only try it again, but also have some behind-the-scenes content for when we launch the product.

6 p.m.

From now till 7:30, we’re focused on Yara. When she finally goes to sleep, I’ll usually try to answer more emails or finish up anything time sensitive. I’m not much of a night person, so I try to get as much done as I can during the workday. We’ll end the night with a little bit of TV sometimes, but mostly I’m just trying to get as much sleep as I can.