With America’s taste for tea heating up, it seems inevitable that quality teas and booze should team up to launch an exciting new trend. Tea is being infused in beer, mixed into cocktails and added to vodka and other spirits to create a new generation of “Tea-tails”.
While the notion of combining tea and alcohol is hardly new, you can find evidence of tea’s growing popularity in trendy bars like “The Tippler” in New York’s Chelsea Market, where flavorful natural ingredients are being used innovatively to create unusual tea drinks.
You can order a “Booty Collins” featuring green tea, vodka, passion fruit, lemon and cayenne, or try “The Tea Party”, a delightful concoction made with black tea, rum, vermouth, pineapple, lemon, peach and angostura bitters.
In Philadelphia, Vernick serves up a flaming indulgence called “Field Gun Envy”, made with cognac, rooibos tea, lemon, curacao and bubbles. There’s also a “Milk Punch” featuring a batavia arrack, lapsang souchong, citrus, ginger & allspice.
Traveling in China? You can enjoy a glass of whiskey and green tea almost anywhere.
The teas, tisanes and alcohol drinks produced today use the same basic ingredients and processes that were developed thousands of years ago. Plant parts are dried, fermented, heated, crushed, combined, stewed or distilled to create an infinite variety of flavor profiles and physical effects.
Here are a few basics about how these natural beverages are made:
Alcohol: Broadly speaking, alcoholic beverages are produced from plant materials that have undergone controlled fermentation to develop specific flavor qualities and potency. Beer, whiskey and vodka are generally made from a grain mash, gin is derived from juniper berries, and wine is made from crushed fruit. A second phase of processing called distillation is used to create hard liquor; the removal of impurities and water increases the proportion of alcohol. Sugar-based ingredients can also be added to distilled beverages to create a variety of flavorful and aromatic liqueurs.
Tea: In spite of its immense range of flavors, aromas and uses, tea is made from the leaves of only one plant—camellia sinensis. The specific type of tea produced, such as black, oolong, white, green, yellow or pu-her is determined by the level of oxidation the leaves undergo. Oxidation begins as soon as the leaves are picked. As they wither and brown, the flavor and aroma compounds begin to develop. It’s the timing and method in which the oxidation is halted that determines the type of tea produced.
Tisanes or Herbal Infusions: Tisanes can be made from any type of fresh or dried botanical. Flowers, leaves, seeds and roots can all be steeped in boiling water to release their essential oils. Although they’re not technically considered tea, tisanes are prepared similarly, are often blended with tea, and are prized for their healthful qualities.
While the results of mixing two or three of these ancient beverages can yield complex, nuanced flavors, the preparation can be amazingly simple. Many great tea-infused drink recipes require nothing more than the cold-steeping of tea leaves in your favorite alcohol base. The steeping can take anywhere from 5 minutes to 5 days to develop the full flavor, but the effort involved is almost zero.
So whether you’re after a fun new way to enjoy tea or a serious taste adventure, there’s plenty to discover in the realm of “Tea-tails”.
Recipe from Sugar and Charm
Earl Grey Tea Cocktail (serves 1)
Ingredients:
- 6 ounces cold Earl Grey tea
- 1 1/4 ounces gin
- 1 1/4 ounces honey simple syrup (recipe below)
- 1/2 ounce fresh-squeezed lemon juice
- 2 lavender sprigs
Directions:
- Brew 4 cups Earl Grey tea. This will give you enough to make a few cocktails. Store in the refrigerator to keep cold.
- Make a batch of honey simple syrup to store in the fridge as well.
- 5 cups water
- 1 cup honey
- Bring to a simmer until honey has dissolved.
- Then cool in the fridge.
- Add all of the above ingredients into a cocktail shaker, with 2 sprigs lavender and ice.
- Shake several times.
- Then strain the cocktail into a glass over one large ice cube.
- Garnish with lavender.
Image by Gabriel Amadeus, it has been rotated and cropped. Usage license – CC BY 2.0
