A good friend of mine owns her own tea company and makes phenomenal blends.  She also happens to be fond of my drinks.  The other day I had some friends over and we were all playing on my home bar making a lot of crazy drinks, some amazing, some bad, some funky, some classic.  At the end of it all while we were just sitting around talking and hanging out, Tiffany tells me she wants me to use some of her tea in my cocktails.  I meet up with her the following day at her tea lab and we just go through mounds of tea she has and she picks her favorites and gives me a few ounces of each.

Seeing how fall is rolling around (not soon enough), I thought a chai tea cocktail would work perfectly for this chilly season.  The roots of this cocktail are actually built off of a Manhattan, if you can believe it.  Often when I work on cocktails I pick a classic and work around the structure of how it’s made, and see how I can deconstruct it to build something a little bit different.  Here’s what I got: