Beyond the Bag: Whole-Leaf Iced Teas That’ll Blow Store-Bought Away
One week from today, the shopping commences. Sausages, burger meat and buns. Charcoal. Mustard and ketchup. Ice for canned beverages—adult and otherwise. Cocoa powder, flour, sugar and butter for those “world-famous” brownies.
Whole-leaf tea, too, has got to figure into shoppers’ Memorial Day Weekend plans. But not for mugs of hot oolong while gathered around the picnic table. Instead, as the holiday serves as the informal kick-off to summer, the tea leaves get transformed into glorious, thirst-quenching, quaffable iced tea.
Iced Tea Season Lands With a Splash
Finally—iced tea season is here! And as tea fanatics, we could not be more thrilled. We sip hot tea every day, regardless of the season. But when temperatures climb and days grow long, we also adore turning the hundreds of teas we carry into delicious pitchers of frigid, satisfying elixirs.
We brew it, fill a pitcher with the Camellia sinensis gorgeousness, and keep it in the fridge. It rarely lasts more than a day. We bring chilled tea with us in thermoses to work, and park them beside us while we’re navigating the Front Range of Colorado running errands or visiting Ku Cha stores. Picnics? Required.
With a forecast of temperatures reaching into the 80s for at least the beginning of the holiday weekend, dust off those vessels you use to store tea in the fridge. You’ll need them for months—at least into October.
We’ll explore iced tea across its long season. And that includes diving deep into our line of premium teas packed in large bags—our only bagged teas. This line makes it easy to make big batches of your favorite summer treat.
Today, however, we consider a trio of teas offering a diversity of flavors. Feel like adding lemon and mint to the brews? Go for it! Iced tea is about experimentation and fun.
The 101 on Brewing Iced Tea
First, however, a quick iced tea primer. You’ll brew in larger batches than your morning cup or pot. Half a gallon—eight cups—is a good quantity to have parked in the refrigerator.
You’ll want between 1-2 teaspoons of whole-leaf Camellia sinensis tea for each cup brewed. More if you like it stronger. For herbal blends that don’t contain traditional tea, you can use more; bitterness generally is less of a concern.
Heat the water—just shy of boiling for Camellia sinensis, about 175-185 degrees. For herbal blends without traditional tea in them, boiling is fine.
Add hot water to tea leaves in a vessel of some sort, and steep for 3-5 minutes for black and oolong; 2-3 minutes for green and white; and 5 minutes or much longer for herbal teas without Camellia sinensis in the blend.
Strain the tea from the vessel into the pitcher you’ll use to store the tea in the ‘fridge. When it cools a little bit, taste. If it tastes too strong, add cold water until it’s just right.
Voila—tea time.
Iced Tea Season: Moroccan Mint Green Tea
People across North Africa drink lots of tea. Their cuppa of choice? Not chai, Darjeeling, matcha or oolong. Instead they sip what’s widely known as Moroccan mint green tea—the drink is especially popular in Morocco, though also beloved in Algeria, Tunisia and Libya, among others.
This superb tea preparation hinges on blends of two kinds of whole-leaf tea: gunpowder and spearmint. What’s gunpowder? Also known as Zhu Cha or “Pearl Tea,” the leaves get rolled into small pellets resembling gun powder. This green tea packs a punch—strong, with smoky flavors. It’s a wonderful pick-me-up.
For Moroccan mint tea, tea artisans add spearmint leaves, yielding an enchanting blend: part smoke, part green tea grassiness, part bright mint. It’s perfect. And it brews into a superb iced tea.
In North Africa, people serve it sweet. We don’t think it needs tooth-aching levels of sugar, but a little honey or sprinkling of sugar? Sure.
Iced Tea Season: Apricot Black Tea
Any primer on American-style iced tea must include black tea. After all, it’s traditional tea’s most oxidized style that gets brewed into the stuff of tall glasses of tea with lemon, mint and ice cubes. We love it.
Unfortunately, most commercial iced tea gets brewed from poor-quality leaves—the dregs, literally. Then companies brew it for far too long. To mitigate the bitterness, they then add sugar galore for balance, and lemon and mint to disguise off flavors.
Here’s a proper black whole-leaf tea to turn into a pitcher of iced excellence. The black tea, from China, gets joined with real apricot pieces and marigold blossoms. The result? A grand black tea for your first batch of ambrosial iced tea. The apricot and marigold add a fruity profile to the tea’s natural maltiness.
Iced Tea Season: Organic Rose White Tea
Bouquet, perfume, intoxicating aromatics—that’s one of the advantages this blend brings to the iced tea experience. As it’s cold, the aromatics don’t broadcast far beyond the cup—there’s no steam to inhale. But just as a cool glass of wine can send forth hints of apricot, lemon, blackberry and wet granite, so does this beauty enchant with its floral advantages.
Our Organic Rose White Tea proffers Peony White, a beguiling white tea also known as Pai Mu Tan, from China’s Fujian Province in Southern China. This base is famously delicate and sweet—and with strong flavor, too. And it gives off whiffs of peony. To Peony White we add rose petals, rosehips and lavender.
We sip this one, cold, all day across the iced tea months. It enlivens the senses, provides subtle jolts of energy and never disappoints.
