Esteemed Teas from Japan, China for Winning Cold Brews!
During this campaign to introduce our community to iced tea at its best, we have focused on classic variations of Camellia sinensis, mostly from China and Japan. Other countries—most notably India and Sri Lanka—also produce fantastic tea. But as most Americans are familiar with iced tea crafted from black tea grown in these countries, we have been keen to offer fresh suggestions in different directions.
We forge ahead today with a trio of teas that yield iced tea deliciousness—cold-brewed beverages you’ll reach for (in the ‘fridge) all summer. You may even find yourself desiring them once the hot months pass, and we’re back to donning sweaters and planning trips into forests incandescent with bright autumn colors.
As stressed several times in this series, one key to withdrawing especially winning flavors from classic tea is to cold brew the beverage. Steeping tea leaves in chilled water for hours, rather than minutes with hot water, yields a plethora of the subtle aromatics and flavors contained within tea leaves. And it mitigates the bitterness inherent to our favorite beverage.
Each of the teas spotlighted here—a Japanese green, and a Chinese white and oolong—blossoms into a thing of cold-brewed beauty. The teas offer heady aromatics and complex, refreshing flavors.
Cold Brewing Classic Tea: Gyokuro green
When we champion cold brewing outstanding leaves for the sake of iced tea, we mean it! Many Japanese admire gyokuro, which means Jade Dew in Japanese, as the highest grade tea in the island nation. This is not shocking—growing, harvesting and preparing gyokuro involves quite a few steps.
To begin with, farmers shade the tea bushes for 20 days prior to the harvest. This step, which the Japanese take with several kinds of tea, preserves tea’s green color by boosting chlorophyll production. It also floods the leaves with amino acids, giving gyokuro and another classic Japanese tea, matcha, their umami-rich flavors.
Then in early spring, farmers harvest the leaves by hand—gyokuro only sees one harvest a year—and then steam, dry and roll the leaves into shapes resembling pine needles.
Our gyokuro comes from Hoshino, Fukuoka Prefecture in Japan, considered the country’s finest tea-producing region. The tea’s delicate flavor and slightly sweet aftertaste render it irresistible to green tea connoisseurs.
Cold Brewing Classic Tea: Silver Needle white
The route from field to package is straightforward for many teas, especially the kind found in bags and packed into boxes on supermarket shelves. Farmers grow the tea. It gets harvested repeatedly across a long growing season in a hot climate. Machines rapidly dry the leaves. More machines roughly ground the leaves, and stuff them into bags. Then the corporations behind the products ship the bags around the world. And then they sit, often for a year or more, before getting a hot water baptism and turning into a beverage.
This series of steps does not describe those used to create the teas we trumpet for iced tea.
Consider Silver Needle, also known as Bai Hao Yin Zhen. Farmers pick needles only in early spring to make this beauty. After getting hand picked, the prized buds are fanned out and dried in the sun before getting lightly fired over charcoal at a low heat. The step arrests oxidation, while also preserving the tea’s affecting silver color.
Silver Needle is the sweetest of white teas. It will coat your mouth with a clean, smooth flavor. Among white teas, it’s among the best for cold brewing and sipping chilled.
Cold Brewing Classic Tea: Oriental Beauty oolong
We adore oolong. No style offers such a variety of flavors and aromas. The diversity comes from oxidation—tea artisans oxidize oolong for different periods of time. The variations produce a range of unique tastes.
Taiwan is known for its oolongs, including this one, also called Bai Hao from Mount Ali. The leaves on this famous tea, reminiscent of autumn foliage, get harvested in summer. They also undergo an additional step: insects nibble on the leaves! Instead of ruining the tea, the insect chomping enhances the flavor. After harvesting, the leaves experience more oxidation than most other Taiwanese oolongs. Bai Hao broadcasts virtually no astringency, and a novel aromas of ripe peaches and honey.
