How to Make Iced Tea: Three Methods for Summer
Tea lovers, start your engines. Because Memorial Day Weekend, the unofficial launch of summer, begins tomorrow. And what does the hot season promise? Cold tea!
You’ll want a thermos of chilled tea for the morning hike, and the afternoon bike ride up the canyon. Headed out for some bird watching? Don’t forget the chilled rooibos. Errands call for frigid matcha, picnics only improve with cups of icy oolong, and noon at the office compels you toward frosty white tea.
After dinner? Of course. One of our caffeine-free herbal blends will soothe you into sleepy-time serenity.
How best to craft that cold tea? Reader, we’ve got you covered. Three distinct methods yield different pots of high-quality iced tea.
Pro tip: Go nuts with garnishes for iced tea. Mint and lemon are classic. But raspberries, wheels of orange, basil, watermelon spears, a whole star anise and a gazillion other ideas also contribute swimmingly to iced tea triumph!
Cold Brew
Looking for easy? This is your new go-to. Good news: Cold brewing tea also produces especially smooth and delicious beverages. It’s all about the tannins, which are naturally bitter. Hot water withdraws a lot of tannins from the leaves of traditional Camellia sinensis teas. But cold brewing keeps most of those tannins within them.
Method
Use two tablespoons for every 8 ounces of water—about 1.5 times the amount for regular tea, as cold extraction is slower and less forceful. Add the tea to the water, stir briefly, cover, and refrigerate for 8 to 12 hours. Overnight is always a smart approach. This method is especially valuable for green, white and oolong teas, all of which can turn astringent with heat.
Batch brew
Going for all-American style iced tea? Then this is the protocol for you. Most of the iced tea you have consumed at restaurants, and from vending machines and grocery stores, is made using the batch method. Those big pots of tea your mom kept on the stove during hot summer days? They were batch brewed. This is the workhouse recipe, and it’s easy-peasy.
Method
Heat water to about 200 degrees—just shy of boiling for most blacks and herbals, and cooler for greens. Use about 1.5 tablespoons of loose-leaf tea for every eight ounces of water. Steep for between 3 and 5 minutes, remove the leaves using a strainer, and let the tea cool slightly before pouring into a vessel and parking in the refrigerator. When it’s time to serve, just pour the tea over ice in a glass.
This is perfect for black tea, and any style calling for a more strong, robust profile. Because the tea cools down naturally after brewing with heat, some of the more delicate aromatics get lost through evaporation. This works well for strong teas, but is not ideal for teas proffering delicacy and nuance.
Flash chill
Here’s a little-known style that brews tea fast through heat, but also preserves more of the volatile, aromatic and flavor compounds that get lost during batch brewing.
To flash chill, you brew a concentrated hot batch at double strength—4 tablespoons of tea for every 8 ounces of water. And then as soon as it’s brewed, you pour the hot concentrate over an equal amount of ice, which doubles the amount of liquid while also arresting the evacuation of those prized compounds.
Method
For roughly half of a gallon of flash-brewed tea, brew 16 tablespoons of loose-leaf tea in 32 ounces of hot water just shy of boiling—between 170 and 200 degrees depending on tea type. Steep for 3 to 4 minutes. Strain the liquid from the tea leaves and then pour the concentrated brewed tea into a vessel with 32 ounces of ice cubes. Once the ice melts, you’ll have about 64 ounces of brewed iced tea. Keep it in a vessel in the refrigerator. This method is wonderful for a wide variety of teas—especially ones with floral or delicate, complex notes.
Happy Memorial Day Weekend—and happy iced-tea season!
Iced Teas for Summer: Grilled Peach Seasonal Blend
Feeling fresh, local peach juice dribble down a chin may remain a month or so away. But you can still get your peach on with this new seasonal flavor from Ku Cha House of Tea. It’s a true taste sensation. Check out this ingredient list: oolong tea, black tea, peach, pineapple, apple, mango, black and pink peppercorn, peach blossom, calendula, sunflower—wow! This beauty takes well to punching it up with sweetener, Southern-style. But the wallop of fruit in this tea also makes it a pleasure to drink without any sweet assistance. It reminds us of freshly grilled Palisade peaches served with warm vanilla ice cream. All brewing methods work for this treasure. But the flash approach might produce the best flavor.
Iced Teas for Summer: Fruit Punch Seasonal Blend
Kids sure love those juice boxes. Parents? Not so much. Too much sweetener, and a flood of fake flavors add up to a beverage category utterly lacking in adult vibes. Welp, here comes our Fruit Punch Seasonal Blend to the rescue. This power-packed blend contains mango, orange, cherry, pineapple, elderberry and apple—and that’s just the fruit! We also add hibiscus, rose, rosehip, beetroot, marigold, strawberry leaf and blackberry leaf to the mix. It’s a joyous spectacle of herbal tea artisanship, and perfect iced—the essence of refreshing. All brewing methods work for this. We especially like flash and batch brewing for this delight.
Iced Teas for Summer: Enchanted Forest Green
This makes such a pretty iced tea, one that brings to mind a tropical forest, thanks to the coconut shreds. The base, green tea, can be superb when iced. To that we add herbal, grassy green mate, the foliage from the South American shrub yerba mate. Rose petals decorate this blend with floral touches, as do cornflower blossoms. It contains hints of cherry, too, giving the final brew perfume redolent of Black Forest cherry cake. This makes for a wonderful cold-brew tea; the method preserves the play of flavors and aromatics.
Iced Teas for Summer: Horchata Blend
We find horchata one of the more mesmerizing beverages to emerge across North America during the past few decades. It’s been a staple in Mexico for generations, but relatively novel to most Americans until recently. Thank you, Mexico, for this magnificent beverage. Our version leverages both earthy pu-erh and black teas, giving it depth and muscle. It includes sweet rice herb, a common botanical in Asia that carries notes of cooked white rice. Then comes the baking spices that dwell at the center of the horchata experience: cinnamon, allspice, ginger, cloves and cardamom. It’s got vanilla too, of course. We embrace flash brewing for this blend, but all methods work quite well.
Iced Teas for Summer: Midsummer Mate (Organic)
Such zip and vigor! Peppermint and lemongrass punch up our Midsummer Mate tea with the winning—and classic iced tea—flavor combination of mint and lemon. But this charmer also contains green tea (vegetal, herbal) and yerba mate (earthy, slightly smoky). The combination yields a marvelous and easy-sipping iced tea. Given the delicate flavors, both cold and flash brewing work well.
Iced Teas for Summer: Watermelon Chiller
When you’ve got a watermelon tea, you really have no option but to include it in any self-respecting list of iced tea options. Watermelon–essence of summer! We brew and sip—really, more like gulp and guzzle—this tea across the warm months. It’s simply beautiful. Our Watermelon Chiller rests on a foundation of silver needle white tea, an especially nuanced-yet-powerful white tea. We then swaddle this enchanting base with watermelon, honeydew melon, apple, hibiscus, elderberry, peppermint and rosehip. Truly—it’s an ideal summertime iced tea. Given the delicate white tea base, it takes especially well to cold brewing, but flash brewing works well, too.
