Cold Drip Tea Recipe

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As Kenji's tests have shown, there's really no reason to brew your tea in the sun, and hot tea chilled down with ice can taste mulch-y and bitter. Cold-brewed iced tea is naturally sweet, clean-tasting, and refreshing. This hands-off method is easy as can be, and works well whether you're tossing in regular ol' tea bags or stepping it up with fancy loose white, green, or oolong teas. You can even re-steep the same leaves in a second round to get the most out of your investment.

Is it worth it to use filtered or bottled water for iced tea? Depends on your source. Read up on the results from our taste test.

Cold Brewed Iced Tea With Fruit

While loose tea leaves are a bit more forgiving and can be steeped overnight, we find that tea bags are best brewed for around 5 hours.

*The % Daily Value (DV) tells you how much a nutrient in a food serving contributes to a daily diet. 2, 000 calories a day is used for general nutrition advice.

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How To Cold Brew Tea (simplest Technique) — Chef Iso

Fast forward a few years, and my mom let up on her soda-once-a-week rule. I started guzzling Dr. Pepper like she guzzled unsweetened iced tea, and I squealed every time I grabbed the wrong cup from the cup holder. Yuck!

Nowadays, I’ve given up the soda in favor of good clean water. I’ve always wanted to understand my mom’s iced tea thing, and I’ve finally found a way to really, truly enjoy it—cold brew!

The cold brew method reminds me of sun tea, since you’re just steeping tea in water for hours, but cold brew takes place in the refrigerator instead of the back porch.

Cold Brew Mint Blueberry Iced Tea

Heat brings out the tannic, bitter flavors in tea. In the absence of heat, you’re left with perfectly refreshing, super smooth tea for slow summer sipping. It isn’t bitter in the slightest. The same is true for coffee, which is why I love cold brew coffee so much.

The method itself is incredibly simple. Just combine loose-leaf tea or whole tea bags and water in a pitcher and let the tea infuse the water for 6 to 12 hours in the refrigerator (see instructions below for specifics). Strain, and you have cold-brew tea that will taste great for days!

Bon Appetit suggested that they have best results with loose-leaf tea, so I used loose-leaf here, but I’ve since been making lazy cold-brew tea by soaking whole bags in water, which tastes almost as good and is much easier to make.

Cold Brew Chai

Another option? Steep your loose-leaf tea in a clean French press—just press down the filter to remove those loose tea leaves and pour!

Super simple, refreshing cold brew iced tea without the tannic, bitter flavors found in regular tea! Plus, it stays fresh tasting for days.

The information shown is an estimate provided by an online nutrition calculator. It should not be considered a substitute for a professional nutritionist’s advice. See our full nutrition disclosure here.

Iced Tea Recipe (super Fast)

Please let me know how it turned out for you! Leave a comment below and share a picture on Instagram with the hashtag #.

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© Cookie and Kate 2010 - 2024. All rights reserved. Cookie and Kate is a registered trademark of Cookie and Kate LLC.Summer can be tricky season for a tea lover. At a time when tea shops everywhere are hawking their freshly picked spring harvests, it's too damn hot to pull out the kettle and brew any of them. (How people swig hot tea all summer in the swampy heat of Hong Kong and Chennai I do not know.) The solution for those of us who can't stand the heat is to brew our tea ice-cold, especially considering how most of the bottled iced tea you can buy in the States—overly sweetened to cover up a jolt of tannins, and rank with off flavors— isn't worth its bottle.

Friday Drink Day

There's more to making quality iced tea than meets the eye. On the surface, you can ice any old tea any way you want and get a refreshing drink, but the way I see it, refreshing and drinkable are just the starting point. A good iced tea can be just as complex, interesting, and delicious as a hot tea, and we shouldn't have to sacrifice cold temperatures and Collins glasses for the most interesting facets of the teas we love. If coffee nerds can geek out about iced beverages, there's no reason us tea people can't do the same.

What does a fantastic iced tea taste like? Much of that answer depends on you and your tastebuds, but for me that means a tea that's naturally sweet (sugar need not apply), clean-tasting, and refreshing with little to no bitterness and astringency. Astringent tannins dry out the tongue, leaving you feeling parched even after a big gulp, and while they add structure and balance to hot tea, they're just not what I'm after in a glass of iced.

A really good tea doesn't just taste good; it's aromatic, too, and it also has some body, a rounded richness than lingers long after you've finished a sip, leaving a sweet finish on the tongue and down your throat. I want that quality in my iced tea as well, something to cool me down even once I've drained my glass.

Cold Brewed Iced Tea Recipe

In short: A great iced tea makes you pause and take notice. It's a different animal from hot tea, but done right, is just as worthy of savoring.

On the road to great iced tea, we have three questions to consider: the brewing method, tea leaf concentration, and the teas best suited to the job.

A few years ago, Kenji did a deep dive into sun tea, the practice of brewing tea using the heat of the sun for hours. He effectively punctured the entire concept, finding that a tea you cold-brew in the fridge tastes just as good as sun tea, and a little cleaner in flavor, plus it doesn't carry sun tea's risk of bacterial growth. He also found what many tea drinkers know: if you brew a tea hot, then chill it down in the fridge, you get a drink that tastes like stale cold tea.

Cold Brew Tea Recipe

I did my own version of that test, comparing a high quality green tea brewed in the fridge with cold water to brewing hot tea, covering it, refrigerating until cold. I also tried a tea version of the Japanese iced coffee method, which many coffee people vastly prefer to cold brew these days, in which I brewed tea at double strength, then diluted it to normal strength over ice cubes to ice it. The method's advocates say that, for coffee at least, the resulting brew is cleaner and brighter with less unwanted oxidation.

But tea doesn't play by coffee's rules, at least not in my tests. Hot tea chilled down to iced still tastes like bitter mulch water. The Japanese method fared a little better: it had the body and richness I wanted, but tasted simultaneously over-extracted and watered down. The cold-brew method, steeped overnight for eight hours, worked like a charm—sweet, refreshing, and full of great body and an aftertaste that cooled my throat down like an alpine breeze.

Even better, I've yet to over-steep a tea when cold-brewing. Batches that steep for 24 hours don't taste bitter or even noticeably different to those that steep for five or eight, which makes it especially easy to make a large batch overnight and drink it for hours the next day. Once you're done steeping, don't toss those leaves! You can re-steep them for a second or even third brew that, while not as powerful in flavor and body, still tastes better than most of the bottled stuff. Remember, good tea doesn't

How To Make Cold Drip Coffee & Why It Beats Immersion Cold Brew Every Time