So I went for a second steeping, and found it pretty flavorless. Granted, I did go pretty bold on the first steeping, so I’m really not surprised. As a result, I decided to dump some gin in and see what happens. At first I took a small glass and just mixed the two with a two to one tea to gin ratio. The tea was too flavorless and definitely still too hot. I could smell the alcohol evaporating (and I shed a tear). Also, the gin just blared through. It really didn’t even taste watered down at all. I felt like I was just drinking hot Seagrams.
As a result, I gave the rest of the tea a minute to cool while I handled some laundry, and then went ahead and dumped the rest (10-12 oz’s maybe?) over some ice. A liberal amount of honey, a splash of Rose’s Lime (because I’m too lazy to juice real limes right now), maybe 2 oz’s of gin and I got to shaking.
Not too shabby. I can actually taste the tea itself, and the Rose’s and honey seem to bring back that citrus cream flavor. I can’t taste the gin at all, which is a bit of a bummer, but because I used cheap gin, it’s not an awful thing.
This small victory has brought about a new challenge. My summer goal is to create a worthy gin and tea cocktail. So far, all I’ve found is from actual mixologists using tools and ingredients that most of us probably don’t have on hand. I want to create a tea based cocktail that the average tea loving drunk could prepare with items they most likely have on hand. It’ll start with cheap ingredients until I start to narrow down the basic idea, and eventually I’ll come up with a top shelf version using Hendricks Gin (hands down my favorite thus far) and a tea yet to be named.
(Note that this will probably never come to fruition, but it’s my next distraction)
