Thai tea is a great drink with a sweet, creamy taste and texture, and an amazing fragrance. We have already touched on Thai tea recipes and how you should watch out for Thai tea calories. However, one last question still remains and that is “does Thai tea have caffeine?”. This question is a little complicated as Thai tea has many ingredients (hence the dilution) so we will be providing our own estimation in this article.
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The content in a typical Thai tea
All tea typically contains some caffeine. But the amount of caffeine can vary greatly depending on tea type. We have looked through a few sources but Adagio Tea’s blog contains really great content and explanation for this.
There are many factors impacting caffeine content such as tea type, method of brewing, water temperature, etc.
Adagio provides an estimation of caffeine per 8 oz cup as follow:
- Matcha: 60-80 mg
- Black/Assam: 60-75 mg
- Oolong: 30-45 mg
- Green: 15-45 mg
- White: 10-15 mg
- Herbal: 0 mg
“Darker” tea tend to have higher caffeine content based on the above information, therefore we can move onto the key focus of this article next!
So, how much caffeine is in Thai milk tea?
Based on our estimation, there is 45 to 55 mg of caffeine per each up of your iced Thai milk tea (this may vary depending on recipe). You might ask, how did we come to this number? In the previous article, we have broken down all of Thai milk tea ingredients as well as how much of them go into each cup of Thai milk tea.
In the recipe that we used, we had prepared about 200 ml of tea before adding everything else like ice, sugar, condensed milk, and evaporated milk. According to the ChaTraMue label, Thai tea is made from red Assam tea. Without any milk, Thai tea is dark brown-ish / dark reddish in color. To fill an 8 oz cup with Thai milk tea, we had only used 6 oz of tea then added a lot of other ingredients without any caffeine content. So Thai milk tea will not have the same caffeine content as a cup of, let’s say, pure black/assam tea (60-75 mg).
Is 45 to 55mg / cup a lot? Caffeine content comparison with other beverages
So how is Thai tea compared to other popular beverages which are known to have caffeine content?
- Thai tea ~45 to 55 mg / 8 oz
- Coffee would have about 125 to 150 mg / 8 oz , so about 3x the amount of caffeine in Thai milk tea
- Based on Coca-Cola company, 12 oz coke can contains about 34 mg of caffeine (so about 23 mg for 8 oz, which is lower than Thai milk tea)
- According to Redbull, their energy drink contains 80 mg of caffeine per 250 ml (that’s roughly 8.5 oz) – this is almost 2x caffeine content of Thai milk tea
We ourselves consume 1 cup of black coffee each day so we never notice any impact from Thai milk tea’s caffeine content whenever we have a cup (or two) of Thai milk tea.
The conclusion
Yes, Thai tea definitely contains caffeine. A cup of iced Thai milk tea would have more caffeine content than your soft drink or energy drink, however, it is still lower than pure tea or a cup of coffee.
So if you have sensitivity towards caffeine, keep this info in mind before you drink your Thai milk tea. Alternatively, you can also opt for Thai tea desserts as well!
Learn more about Thailand from our other posts: