I love homemade iced tea: Freshly made, no preservatives, and you can control its intensity and flavor by using more or less tea leaf, or adding other herbs. Even better, you can make gallons of fresh iced tea from scratch for a fraction of the cost of instant or bottled teas. While iced tea is easy to make, following some simple guidelines can help you make the best iced tea for you and your family.
1. Use Good Water
Tea is mostly water, so that water needs to be good. Whether you are making hot tea or iced tea, your tea water should be:
- Fresh: Your water should be fresh from your tap. Don't use water that has been sitting around, even if it is in a water filter pitcher. Water and ice that are stored in a refrigerator or freezer for any length of time will begin to take on food odors, which can spoil the flavor of your iced tea.
- Cold: Don't try to speed up the tea-making process by running the water hot out of the tap. That hot water has less oxygen than cold water, and will make an inferior tea.
- Good Tasting: You don't necessarily have to use filtered or bottled water to make your iced tea, but the water should not have a funky or "off" taste or smell. I've found that if water has a slightly sweet taste, it is often very good for making tea.
2. Use Good Tea
You don't have to use ultra-premium tea to make iced tea, but good tea (either bagged or loose leaf) makes a much tastier beverage than the cheap tea that you find in so many grocery stores. Find a reputable tea merchant and select good quality teas. If you choose to use loose leaf teas, there are several different types of loose leaf tea makers, filter pitchers, and infusers on the market for making your tea.
3. Preventing Cloudy Iced Tea
Cloudy iced tea is typically caused by chilling the tea too quickly after it has been brewed. The cloudiness is an aesthetic problem: It doesn't affect the tea's flavor. Here are some tricks for preventing cloudy iced tea:
- Use Nilgiri black tea for iced tea. It resists clouding better than other black teas, goes well with lemon, and makes a smooth and tasty hot tea, too!
- Don't "rapid chill" your iced tea. Make the tea and then let it cool down at room temperature before refrigerating or pouring over ice. (Also, by not pouring the iced tea directly over ice, thus diluting it, you'll have better control over its strength.)
- Cold-brew your ice tea (also called "refrigerator brewing"). See tips below.
- If your tea is already cloudy, try adding a few slices of lemon, or a shot or two of boiling water to the tea to clear it up.
4. Refrigerator Iced Tea
First the bad news: Refrigerator brewing iced tea is not for the impatient. It takes a long time to properly brew iced tea without heat. Still, this method has several advantages:
- It doesn't heat up your home on hot days.
- Your tea brews clear.
- Your tea may contain both fewer tummy-bothering tannins as well as less caffeine.
- Cold brewing can be a good way of using up lesser quality teas: The cold-water extraction process can mute bitter and disagreeable flavors.
Brewing refrigerator iced tea is simple: Just add tea or teabags to a pitcher or jar of cold water, cover, and let sit in the refrigerator for about 12 hours. The amount of tea used varies depending on your preference: I usually use 1-2 teaspoons of loose leaf tea, or 1-2 teabags per 8 ounces of water. Loose leaf tea can either be placed in an infuser, or added directly to the water. When the tea is done infusing, just pour the tea through a strainer into a pitcher. Any type of tea can be used to make refrigerator iced tea, though some work better than others.
Good Tea Varieties for Making Iced Tea
- Ceylon black tea is from Sri Lanka, and often has a natural lemon/citrus flavor. It makes a particularly delicious iced tea when cold-brewed.
- Keemun is a Chinese black tea that also can make a wonderful refrigerator iced tea. However, Keemun can be very expensive, so you may not want to use it in the quantities you need for a large pitcher of iced tea.
- Avoid making iced tea with Assam. It's malty characteristics make it taste strange as a cold-brew iced tea.
- Many green teas take well to the refrigerator brewing method. A decent gunpowder green tea, or mid-grade Japanese sencha can make lovely and refreshing iced teas.
- Oolong teas can make very interesting and remarkably refreshing cold-brewed iced teas. Oolong teas are partially oxidized, and some are very "green" while others are closer to black tea in color and flavor. Bao Zhong, also called Pouchong, is a very lightly oxidized green oolong with sweet and floral flavors that makes an amazing iced tea. Ti Guan Yin is another floral green oolong that is richer in flavor than Bao Zhong, and it makes a hearty iced tea indeed. If you like darker oolongs, try Oriental Beauty: This oolong is heavily oxidized due to little leafhopper insects that bite its leaves while still on the plant. It makes a honey-sweet and spicy iced tea. Oolong teas that are flavored with osmanthus and ginseng also worth trying as refrigerator brews.
- White teas are often too subtle to make good refrigerator-brewed iced teas. Many herbal tisanes (herbal teas), such as rooibos, also need hot water to extract their flavor. The same goes for chai tea: While iced chai is delicious, the spice flavors in chai won't develop in cold water. That said, you might want to try adding a particularly strong herb, such as fresh or dried mint, to your batch of black or green refrigerator iced tea for a bit of extra flavor.
Lainie Petersen - Hi! My name is Lainie and I am a writer who lives in rural Southern Oregon. I have a number of interests including religion, spirituality, ...
