Ku Cha House of Tea Celebrates Diversity of Iced Teas During Summer’s Heat
People savored hot tea for centuries before pouring it over ice, adding a slice of lemon (and maybe a little sugar) and gulping it down on sweltering days.
Most tea drinkers around the world still prefer their favorite beverage warm. But the United States is different. Here, 85 percent of all tea consumed is iced, according to the Tea Association of the United States.
How did tea turn so frigid in America?
Iced Tea Begins in Colonial America — But It’s Boozy
It begins with booze. Colonial revelers liked to mix alcoholic beverages in punch bowls, and they often used tea to flavor their drinks and dilute the liquor. But that wasn’t exactly iced tea.
Americans first started purposefully cooling down their tea — minus the booze — in the 1860s; by 1876 the book Buckeye Cookbookhad an iced tea recipe, the first one recorded in the world. Shortly after, the book Housekeeping In Old Virginiaappeared, and that book contained a recipe for sweet tea, one that might look familiar today in the American South, where sweet tea has become a staple.
The 1904 Worlds Fair in St. Louis gave iced tea a huge boost. That summer was especially blazing in Missouri, and the 20 million fairgoers shunned hot beverages. Instead, they poured tea over ice. The Fair introduced a lot of people from the United States and around the world to iced tea.
Until World War II, consumers evenly divided their choices between black and green tea. Today, however, black tea is by far the most popular kind of tea; green tea imports in 2018 represented just 14.6 percent of all imported tea, according to the Tea Association of the United States.
The tide turned in the United States during the war, when trade with China and Japan was stopped; the countries were the largest suppliers of green tea. As a result, Americans turned to British-backed teas from India. By the end of the war, black tea was commanding 99 percent of tea sales.
Iced Tea Spreads Around the World
We often think that iced tea is a uniquely American beverage, but it turns out people around the world drink it.
In Japan, for example, iced tea is a phenomenon, with cans and bottles for sale in vending machines across the island nation. Most Japanese iced tea is green or oolong tea, and it’s unsweetened. Black iced tea in Japan, on the other hand, normally is sweet. The Japanese, too, favor milk tea, which is black tea combined with milk.
Brazilians drink maté, but unlike their Argentine neighbors Brazilians drink their maté over ice, and sweetened. They also often add lime juice to the drink, called “maté com limão. Vendors go up and down Rio de Janeiro’s beaches with coolers full of the drink.
Iced tea is popular in Hong Kong restaurants, where black tea gets brewed in metal pots, and then poured into glasses of ice that often also hold simple syrup. Slices of lemon get placed atop the glass of tea, and customers then muddle the drink to fully combine the lemon, tea and sugar.
South Koreans drink cold green tea in the summer months. Austrians call iced tea “Eistee” and drink it with a lot of sugar.
Taiwan’s version of iced tea — bubble tea — has turned into an international phenomenon. The beverage normally combines brewed black tea with milk, sugar and tapioca balls. The tea, often referred to as “boba tea,” is sipped through straws wide enough for the tapioca balls — boba fans love those beads of tapioca.
The Swiss, of all people, introduced bottled iced tea to the world. Two employees of the Swiss beverage company Bischofszell tried iced tea in the United States and decided to bottle it. The company was the first to put bottled iced tea on mass-market shelves, in 1983.
As a tea importer, with hundreds of teas for sale online and on our stores’ shelves, we experiment with different styles of iced tea. While we think certain black teas from India and green teas from China can become winning iced teas, we especially enjoy iced herbal teas.
This summer, we are savoring Paradise Peach iced tea — Colorado grows some of the finest peaches in the United States, in our opinion, and this tea captures the peachy essence of the fruit.
Our house-crafted Paradise Peach blend involves hibiscus, rosehip, apple, orange and natural flavor. Our recipe, which we are featuring this month, is a winner.
Sweet Heart Iced Tea is a Ku Cha House of Tea Favorite
Drink: Sweet Heart Iced Tea
But a longstanding favorite is iced Sweet Heart tea. Our custom blend incorporates licorice, rosebud and a whisper of stevia with hibiscus (which adds a jolt of sour) and refreshing peppermint. We could sip this iced tea for hours on a hot day.
Recipe for Pitcher of Sweet Heart Iced Tea
Use 2 teaspoons of tea for every 8 to 12 ounces of water. Most pitchers range between 48 and 60 ounces.
Pour boiling water over tea in a saucepan or some other heat-safe vessel and let steep for four minutes or more for a pitcher. Take tastes of the tea as it brews. Once you like the flavor, pour the hot tea through a strainer into another heatproof vessel and let cool.
Once the tea is cool, pour into the pitcher. Serve in glasses over ice.
