Tea in Summer
I like hot tea all year, and iced, but the proportions of each change. On very hot days, I might not touch a cup of hot tea unless I turned on the AC (I try to be thrifty and avoid it). But mostly I will drink hot tea in the morning in the summer and iced tea the rest of the day. I usually keep one caffeinated pitcher and one decaf in the fridge.
In the winter, I go through iced tea very slowly and usually just have one smaller pitcher in the fridge as it is all about the hot tea all day long.
Awesome to see this thread getting more attention again recently! I’ve been alternating between coffee and tea since I originally posted this thread.
I’ve been meaning to experiment a bit with iced tea but there’s so many ways of preparing it that I haven’t even tried any of them yet.
Cold brew for sure! I always get great results with cold brewing, it’s hard being patient enough, though :P
Yeah, the patience factor is hard for sure. Is it really that much better than just doing a normal hot brew and icing it?
I think so (: I prefer flavoured teas so cold steeping helps to bring out the other flavours and the tea becomes a nice kind of background note, rather than being the dominant flavour, and the bitterness isn’t as present in strong teas either. Sometimes a tea can taste totally different through cold steeping, and new flavours come out which you may not have noticed before, and sometimes it’s not even a tiny bit different to flash icing, in which case it’s a bit pointless :P I guess it depends on the tea. It’s fun to play with, anyway (:
Try out hot brewing and cold steeping. They’re both different in my opinion. I prefer cold brewing because it is more easier to make and the flavor is quite different. It is not as strong as if you were to hot brew it. If you prefer a stronger tea flavor, I would suggest hot brewing your iced tea.
Thanks for the tips! It definitely seems subjective so I’ll just have to play around and see what I like better.
I drink tea all year round (am in the Netherlands, we get rain during summer most of the time , and almost no heat whatsoever…..), and love hot tea in summer. For my kids I make iced tea from a Ceylon. Also have a ‘summer tea’ : tea with jasmin and tiny chunks of strawberry. It’s great hot and cold and my kids love it. They also love my sencha green apple, hot or cold. (simon levelt) They generally go with mum though, and drink theirs hot as well.
I very rarely like my tea iced. It has to be a herbal or a rooibos if I’m going to ice it, and it has to be crazy crazy strongly brewed. And sweetened. I find black and other teas iced don’t work for me. I can’t handle the taste… It’s weird. So, I usually drink a lot of hot tea no matter what’s going on.
Last year I drank only iced tea, but I haven’t forgone my morning triple espresso ritual in years (decades???). This year, since joining Steepster, I don’t think that I can give up my post-lunch hot brews—nor should I!
One interesting development is that I tried cold brewing for the very first time recently. Now I am wondering why I always made iced tea the hard way in the past. It actually tastes better cold brewed and requires nearly no effort to produce!
Why does anyone brew their iced tea hot? Is it just a matter of ignorance? Or habit?
Ideas, anyone?
I only ever brew it hot vs cold steeping if I want it immediately. If I had the forethought to make some already I keep a bottle cold steeping in my fridge at all times and just rotate it. Then again, I hadn’t even heard of cold steeping six months ago!
I like really strong teas, and my experiments in cold steeping have yielded weak tasting teas. Maybe I haven’t tried the right kinds.
If I am in the mood for a glass of iced tea, I would hot brew my iced tea. However, any other time where I plan on drinking iced tea all day, I prefer cold brewing. There is no hassle of boiling water and waiting for it to cool down. Just set it up and place it in the fridge the night before.
Do people cold brew with a tea infuser or just tea bags? I made my first cold brew last night with tea bags and it was great, but I normally hot brew iced tea and use an infuser ball.
I’ve never used a tea infuser for cold brewing because I usually make a pitcher at once. We carry large disposable filter tea bags in our store and that is what we use to put a large amount of tea that our infuser wouldn’t be able to. I use tea infuser for single cup of tea.
How long do you usually let it steep for, Marzipan? I’m a strong tea fan too, and I’ve found that it usually takes 24 hours of cold brewing to get to the strength that I like. Some are pretty decent on 12 hour steeps, but usually only if they’re a strong tea to start with.
Katiek – I’ve actually never cold steeped with tea bags! I generally brew in normal water bottles, and have a makeshift funnel which I use to scoop loose tea in through the narrow bottleneck, around double the usual strength, and just add the cold water directly to the bottle. It doesn’t work this way if you want to take the bottle out with you, because I have to pour it through a strainer into a glass before I drink it. Bags would definitely be more convenient! Or those filter bags The Persimmon Tree mentioned. I’ve had a couple before and they’re so handy!
I think I’m mostly on the same page as @Marzipan but when I try cold brewing again I’m going to have to make sure to heed the advice of making it at least double the strength as a hot brew, otherwise it’s going to taste weak for sure.
My only major gripe there is that I’m not comfortable with putting that much tea into one experiment. It’s not the cheapest stuff, you know. ;)
I am totally with you there, Raffi. I have never used my bestest most hoarded teas to cold steep, only average-priced blends which I have a lot of. Sometimes I use cold steeping as a way of quickly getting rid of a tea I’m bored with :P
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