Best Way to Make Iced Tea
I’ve always enjoyed my teas hot. Yesterday I made some tea and left it on the fridge for the night. I tried the tea in the morning and wasn’t that good, so I realized this wasn’t that simple.
What’s the best way of making sugarless iced tea??
Thanks!
In my opinion if you want sugarless iced tea, I would recommend cold brewing. Put tea leaves in cold water,and. Then put he container in the fridge overnight (12-24 hours). The tea will diffuse into the cold water, if just takes a long time. It gives a different flavour profile to the tea.
Also try different teas, some teas are better iced/cold than others.
I hot brew tea in a pitcher like Takeya and then let it cool overnight in the refrigerator. It’s probably not the best way, but it works for me.
I agree with Lala. There are some teas that turn out wonderful cold brewed, sometimes even better than the traditional hot cup! We made a lot of cold brew Darjeeling first flush this summer and enjoyed it thoroughly. The nuances of the tea were much clearer!
For me even a 6-8 hr brew in the fridge worked fine. In fact more than 8 hrs brought some amount of bitterness. I think cold brewing works best with teas that have a delicate character. But you must play around with the amount of tea used and brewing time.
Not all teas are good iced…unless of course you load it up with sugar. :)
I’m a huge fan of cold steeping too. The flavors are often softer but also sweeter, and there is pretty much zero tannin or that slight bitter astringency I seem to inevitably get whenever I do it the traditional way Katiek describes. It does take a long time (and in my opinion, especially with black tea, the longer the better—I’ve let teas sit as long as 4 days and that often makes it super delicious) but it’s easy—the ratios (for me anyway) are the same as with hot tea, just pour in a mason jar or pitcher, stick in the back of the fridge and forget it for a while. And I rotate so there’s always something ready any given day.
Cold steeping is definitely our preferred method too! In the summers at our shop it was more of a case of speed so we would hot steep and pour over ice in a cocktail shaker, but for our house flavour it would be cold steeped.
Here in Toronto we supply tea to Momofuku and they do an incredible cold brewed house tea.
ooooh momofuku cold steeped tea! yum!
i need to try the cocktail shaker flash chilled thing. it seems so neat, and makes perfect sense (i’m no stranger to cocktails, ehrm :).
Yeah cocktail shakers work so well! I shot a few ‘how-to’ videos about making easy iced teas and iced tea lattes this past summer. I’ll put it on the list to edit and will post them on our website and include a link here.
-Dan
I will share my ancient family recipe, by ancient I mean starting with my Great Grandmother, I think it counts as very genuinely Southern at that point since we are all from Georgia :P This recipe fills up a one gallon pitcher.
Take ten tea bags loose tea equivalent. This was always made with Black tea bags, when I wanted to use other types of tea or loose tea I use my Iced Tea Maker (cheating hehe). Boil about 4 cups of water or just a small pot then add the tea bags, let steep for 5 minutes. In the pitcher that will hold the glorious Iced Tea add sugar (we always used a little over half a cup) and then pour the tea into pitcher. Keeping the bags in the pot fill the pot up again with cold water and then pour that into the pitcher. At this point you can either choose to fill the rest of the pitcher up with ice or just cold water.
I have never tried cold steeping, I have heard good things about it and plan on trying it next summer _
ah, classic southern sweet tea. it was quite a revelation to me—up north i hadn’t even heard of it and when you asked for iced in restaurants chances were high you’d get a prepackaged bottle of liptons and a weird look; dunno how much that’s changed hee—and until i tried my hand at it after moving south (husband’s an addict) i assumed it was just iced tea with simple syrup added right before drinking. learning it’s more like making a hyper tea concentrate-slash-simple syrup all at once was quite the surprise!
Oh man, growing up in the South and then moving to the North was a huge shock tea wise, ask for tea and you would get the bottles or the favored nasty stuff, as you said. Eventually places started serving “Southern Style” tea which was good but they made it WAYYY too sweet for my liking :P it is part of the reason I ended up drinking so much soda and coffee when I would eat out in my late teens and early 20s. Now I am in the Midwest and they seem to have a good grasp on Iced tea, not so much Hot tea though which is a little sad.
when my husband (born and raised in the south) flew to australia as a teenager for people to people, he asked for iced tea on the plane and apparently the flight attendant looked at him like he’d grown an extra head haha. it does seem like good hot tea regions and good iced tea regions are often mutually exclusive.
Login or sign up to leave a comment.