Is the Secret to Better Coffee a Bag of Tea?

“She put the cream in my coffee,” Sammy Hagar rasps in the questionable lyrics of Van Halen’s “Up for Breakfast.” But lately I’ve been way more interested in putting tea in my coffee. Mixing tea and coffee isn’t a new idea, but lately I’ve been seeing a lot more of it on café menus as well as chatter about it on Reddit, and some of the drinks have been so good I’ve started making them at home. The best part is now my answer to the age-old question “Would you like tea or coffee?” is sometimes: both!

Combining coffee and tea isn’t new. In the cha chaan tengs of Hong Kong, a drink called yuanyang has been on offer for decades. It typically involves mixing equal parts brewed coffee and black tea, and is then sweetened with condensed milk, evaporated milk, or both. “It’s rich and silky smooth,” my colleague Genevieve Yam, who grew up in Hong Kong, tells me. “The tea and coffee complement each other well, and you end up with a more balanced flavor than if you were to just have tea or coffee on their own.”

Why Tea + Coffee Works

Genevieve gets right to the heart of why the combo can be successful. Coffee and tea are two completely different plants (and even different parts of plants), but they’re both tannic, caffeinated beverages with roasted flavor profiles. Combine them, and it can be like shifting from looking at an image in 2D to 3D—you gain depth via a broader spectrum of overlapping but slightly different flavors and textures. Tea can have a velvety quality and more clear floral overtones that can expand upon coffee’s own version of those elements, while softening coffee’s harsher edges. Coffee, at the same time, can smooth some of the rougher, sandpapery tannins in a strongly brewed black tea.

The key, though, is to bridge those two worlds, and the best way to do that, based on all the examples of coffee-tea beverages I’ve seen so far, is with both dairy and sweetness. The rich, fatty infusion of milk ties the coffee and tea together while softening both. Sugar has a similar effect, and while you do not need to make the drink overtly sweet, a subtle sweetness via at least a very small addition of sugar in some form can help.

Making Coff-Tea at Home

Hong Kong’s yuanyang is one very good option for trying this combo at home, and it can be enjoyed both hot or iced (there is, I should note, a similar drink in Singapore and Malaysia called kopi cham that follows more or less the same formula of black tea + brewed coffee + condensed milk). But there are other drinks that have emerged at modern coffee shops in recent years that are worth your attention.

In most examples I’ve seen, these newer renditions are built on espresso-based drinks, such as cappuccinos and lattes. There’s the dirty chai latte, in which a chai latte is spiked with a shot of espresso. Then there’s the dirty matcha latte, which—I think you can guess—involves adding espresso to a matcha latte.

My personal favorite of the moment, though, is one that we can maybe call (following the above naming convention) a “dirty London fog,” which brings to mind London’s pea-soupers of the Industrial Revolution. However, the drink is far more recent—there’s no chimney sweep in sight. A London fog, for those who don’t know, is an Earl Grey latte. With the addition of coffee, it becomes “dirty,” and it is delicious. The citrus notes of bergamot are a perfect fit with the silky sweetness of steamed milk, and the shot of espresso, particularly a lighter roast that aligns with that orange-oil scent, adds a deeper layer of flavor and aroma.

I’ve seen this dirty London fog (though never by that name) both on a recent trip to Quebec City and in my hometown of NYC. It’s easy to make: Steep a generous amount of Earl Grey tea in hot milk with a sweetener of your choice to taste. Chill it, then pull a shot of espresso, or prepare a moka pot or something similar, steam or froth the Earl Grey–infused milk, combine, and enjoy.

Or maybe you’d like to take this idea and run it in a new direction. Many of these drinks are clearly the creative experiments of baristas and café workers who spend their days with both coffee and tea, and inevitably begin to play with various ways of blending them. The ideas I’ve shared are just the tip of the iceberg. What else can we come up with? A mocha-tea-no? An espresso mar-tea-ni? Cor-tea-do? Espresso tea-nic? Okay, I’ll stop—but don’t be surprised if you try a tea and coffee combo and find you can’t.