As we wade into summer’s pleasures, Ku Cha offers iced tea fans fresh variations of their favorite beverage that showcase the glories of quality tea worldwide
It’s iced tea time across the United States — and time to save the beverage from itself.
Most iced tea is the beverage equivalent of bargain-basement boxed wine: sweet, dull and the product of scraps. Nearly all of it is made from the lowest quality tea, sometimes literally dust from the floors of tea production facilities. It often involves tea extracts, and artificial flavors.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
Artisan Iced Tea? Absolutely.
Tea from the Camellia sinensis plant offers more styles than wine grapes, including classic oolongs and pu-erhs from China, senchas from Japan and black teas from Sri Lanka and India. With herbal teas, the range of iced tea possibilities expands exponentially.
We have spent more than a decade cold-brewing artisan teas into beverages worthy of summer’s pleasures. Now, Ku Cha offers a starter kit to acquaint people with some of its favorites.
Iced tea is not traditional across Asia. Most people sip hot tea. Americans first popularized iced tea, and we are grateful. Good iced tea is a revelation! But the key word here is “good.”
Ku Cha’s Starter Kit includes directions for brewing a proper pot of iced tea, and six teas that offer tea sippers a wide range of unique flavors and aromas. The teas reflect styles from across Asia, and Northern Africa, including both straight teas and blends.
Each of the teas finds deep roots in culture, and is truly artisanal, coming from small, devoted tea farmers whose lives revolve around producing high quality tea.
During the past three months of sometimes agonizing self-denial, anxiety and stress, many of us turned to DIY projects. We learned to make sourdough bread. We bought hand tools for carving wood, and began watching YouTube videos showing us how to turn that piece of cherry into a spoon. If COVID-19 introduced any silver linings, one of them surely is our eagerness to learn new crafts and skills.
Experimenting with iced tea counts as a worthy summertime DIY pursuit. Let’s get started!
How To Crush Your Summer With Artisan Iced Tea
Summer Tranquility Tea
White tea is the least oxidized of all traditional Chinese teas. Even though it contains no sugar, white tea offers sweet flavors and layers of subtlety. White tea serves as an anchor for Summer Tranquility tea, which also incorporates classic Chinese fruits, peach and apricot, for added loveliness. This is a perfect go-to tea all summer.
Organic Sencha
People across Japan drink myriad tea styles, but sencha is the most popular, representing 80 percent of the tea grown in the island nation. Like all Japanese green teas, sencha is steamed first, to prevent oxidization. The step, which is generally not taken in Chinese tea production, produces green teas with more of a grassy, vegetal flavor that Chinese teas. It also broadcasts a lovely flavor for iced tea. We think our organic sencha tea, cold-brewed, is especially wonderful on picnics.
Organic Moroccan Mint
Morocco is not a tea-producing nation — the climate is too arid. But Moroccans are among the most enthusiastic tea drinkers in the world. The national beverage is Moroccan mint tea, which is a combination of Chinese gunpowder tea and mint. Gunpowder tea is normally just green tea leaves (although sometimes oolong) that are rolled into small, round pellets. It’s the pellets that hatched the name “gunpowder tea” rather than explosive combustibility! Organic Moroccan Mint iced tea is wonderful to sip all day, and is exceptional with foods like barbecue, Vietnamese and Mexican food.
Organic Ku Cha Imperial
Most commercial iced teas come from teas grown in Ceylon and India, two countries with excellent climates and environments for supporting tea bushes, as well as cultures that have long savored tea. Commercial iced teas, however, generally aren’t brewed from these countries’ quality leaves. Our Organic Ku Cha Imperial blend, on the other hand, rests on a foundation of premium Ceylon black tea, with the addition of calendula and natural flavors of vanilla, pomegranate, lemon and orange-flower water. It is superb for all-day enjoyment. We so enjoy this while sitting out in the sun, or carried in a flask for sipping during hikes.
Organic Golden Monkey
This spectacular black tea from China’s Fujian Province has been cultivated and served for more than 1,700 years. But exports began less than 20 years ago. We are lucky to have a spectacular source for this tea, which won second place in 2009 during the World Tea Championship. Our Organic Golden Monkey offers profoundly honeyed flavors, which also carry beautiful flavors of peach even though Golden Monkey is just tea leaves. This is another tea made for summer al fresco dining — cook-outs with burgers and grilled chicken, barbecue, Italian sausage sandwiches. We especially prize it with grilled seafood, like salmon. The honeyed flavors well-complement the fish. We also serve Golden Monkey with fruit.
Jasmine Oolong Tea
This tea combines lightly oxidized green oolong tea leaves with jasmine flowers. The best versions, like our jasmine oolong, require evening harvests of potent jasmine blossoms, which tea artisans combine with harvested green tea. After a week or more of blending fresh blossoms with tea, the luxurious perfume of jasmine blossoms permeates the tea leaves. This is China’s finest flavored tea, something we sip hot and cold across the year. We think our Jasmine Oolong pairs well with sweets, as well as Asian, Mexican and Indian foods. It’s a treasure.
