Why do so many tea cocktails not taste like tea? Here is your answer.
When making tea cocktails and mocktails, we always recommend that you brew your tea at double the recommended strength. Most tea cocktails taste nothing like tea because the flavors are much more subtle than their boozy and sweet juice counterparts. In order to make the tea stand out and not get watered down, adding more tea leaves is the way to go.
At first, you might think that you could just brew the tea longer to make it stronger, but that is a common misconception. Over-steeping your tea only makes it more bitter and not more flavorful. Instead, you just want to increase the tea leaves used and keep the water low to concentrate the flavor.
When making iced tea, the usual recommended amount is 1tsp of tea leaves for every 8oz of water. So, to make it double strength, you will instead use 2 tsp for every 8oz.
If the tea you are making is already a pretty strong flavor, you could just increase it slightly to 1.5 tsp for every 8oz.
Using a standard 60oz pitcher, we are going to prep 48oz of tea concentrate
Since our Black Pearl tea is already pretty strong, use 9 tsp of tea (1.5 tsp / 8 oz)
To steep the tea you can use a teapot, t-sac, or any other strainer.
Since this is such a large amount of leaves, try to avoid overpacking the strainer to ensure that you get the full flavor. To demonstrate, I used our stump teapot (18oz)
Brew up two batches or 2 teapots worth, using 4.5 tsp of tea for each batch.
Then pour them into the pitcher over some ice to cool it quickly to room temp.
Store in the fridge until you are ready to use
You can do this for any tea for any tea drink recipe. And of course, you can make much smaller amounts if you are just experimenting. If you make multiple types, we recommend labeling them.
To make your tea cocktail game even easier, we suggest that you make a large pitcher of what you are going to need the day before and store it in the fridge. This way you can focus on drink assembly instead of having to worry about getting your hot tea cold quickly. And it is always nice to have a little extra instead of not enough especially if you are expecting guests.
Plus, there is no harm in having extra iced tea! Even if you don’t use it all in your tea cocktail recipes, you can always just drink it plain and water it down a bit back to its regular strength.
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