Summertime Fun: Tea & Booze

I suspect the first thing that comes to mind for many of us is the popular liver pickler, Long Island Iced Tea, which has no actual tea in it at all. It mostly gets its flavor from sour mix and a splash of Coke, to deceptively hide the 5 or so alcohols mixed in.

Tea (actual tea, Camellia sinensis) successfully lends itself to a host of other interesting alcoholic beverages. Beer with Tea, Champagne with Tea, Mar-tea-nis, and even tea liqueurs have all been explored.

During my Boulder Dushanbe Teahouse days, we made a hibiscus tea mixed with lemonade and Champagne, it’s bright red color accented by fresh mint and a lime slice. Once one went out on a tray through the restaurant, the procession began. Everybody wanted one. We charged $6 for the spritzer, the Hibiscus Cooler, we called it, and couldn’t make them fast enough. We made so many of those drinks that we had to have daily shift dedicated to prepping the ingredients and making the hibiscus tea in 5 gallon batches. It was non stop.

The Teahouse has a number of innovative tea related cocktails on the menu, the combinations of different liquors and liqueurs with various teas for which we never tired of experimenting and sampling and tasting. Malibu with a fruity black tea and some pineapple juice. Amaretto Chai. Earl Grey and Vanilla vodka martinis. Fun times.

More recently, Ineeka Tea in Chicago, partnered with an organic Dutch brewery to make the very fun and tasty Green Tea Bier- a certified organic and Biodynamic ale brewed with real green tea leaves and fresh ginger. It was an interesting brew, “the merging of two age-old brews” we tagged it, since beer and tea are literally two of the most ancient beverages on earth. We have been fermenting grain (or whatever is plentiful) for alcohol and steeping leaves in hot water for pretty much forever. Mixing the two seemed a natural progression!

We won awards for our Bier at Ineeka, but the experiment only lasted a couple batches as we turned our attention elsewhere. We were teamakers, after all, not brewmasters (semantics as that might be).

Besides, we had another wildly popular cocktail to play with. It was a “martini” made of our Roseberry herbal tea (comprised exclusively of rose petals, raspberry and blackberry pieces, sunflower petals and elderflowers) with vodka and some of the ethereal St. Germain elderflower liqueur. This one was dreamy!

We weren’t the first to play around with mixing the ancient brews, I had many a customer in Boulder buying samples of loose teas for their homebrewing experiments, and coffee and beer are nearly ubiquitous (Mountain Sun Java Porter, anyone?). Here in Chicago, Dark Matter coffee partners annually with Half Acre brewery for the buzz inducing Dark Energy. Mmmmmm. Back to tea, San Francisco is home to Jim Woods’ MateVeza , a line of beers brewed of Yerba Mate. If you can find some, try it, it’s a treat. Goose Island’s Jared Rouben and recently partnered with Rod Markus of Rare Tea Cellars for their saisan “Sai-Shan-Tea” beer which they presented at the 2010 Great American Beer Festival and promoted as a great beer for food pairing and cooking (that is another subject entirely!).

Here at Adagio, there are a number of you I’ve interacted with regarding tea cocktails and boozy brews for your business. Infusing your liquor of choice with the tea is one avenue- Black Dragon Pearls , Jasmine Silver Needle, and Sencha Premier have delivered reportedly intoxicating results. Brewing beer by actually steeping the leaves in the mash is another. Floral, sweet, and greener oolongs like Ti Kuan Yin , Jade Oolong and our Huang Jin Bolero have been experiment fodder. Flavored teas like Ginger Peach , Blackberry, or Passionfruit also lend a uniquely refreshing twist to a heady brew.

If you’re not fermenting your own ales and lagers, try a twist on a shandy by making it an Arnold Palmer lager. We’re mostly familiar with the beer-lemonade shandy combo, but other refreshing mixes like ginger ale or soda water or hibiscus tea are popular around the globe. Not suggesting you get into the beer-mosa territory, per se, but the crisp combination of a clean iced tea with a cold lager and a splash of lemonade might be just what you need to complement your summer adventures, be they brunch, a hike, or a day at the beach.

Here are a few recipes to start you off: