The Quest for Better Iced Tea

Photo: Alexia

While June is nearly over, it's still worth noting that June is National Iced Tea Month. I didn't know that a few weeks ago when I started my quest for better iced tea (or I would have written this up sooner).

Personally, my quest started from a different set of motivations.

• I like tea, but 200°F beverages and 90°F temperatures don't really mix well.
• I enjoy a good meal, but can't stand wine and don't drink alcohol. The complexities in fine tea offer the possibilities of matching high quality tea to food in the same ways that wine usually is matched. In short, I think it can offer a way to have a more sophisticated beverage with my meals than soda, water or milk while staying away from alcohol.
• Nearly every iced tea "recipe" I find pretty much disqualifies itself from contributing to the conversation by using Lipton tea bags as their gold standard against which "good" iced tea should be measured. Given that fans of coffee don't hold Folgers up as a benchmark, or $2 wine or McDonald's as the pinnacle of hamburger cuisine, the pulverized bits of tea that are in Lipton bags are the starting point, not the end.

So, I've started on a journey to come up with better iced teas for myself. Like I said, I started with the standard "Lipton recipe" and process, which goes something like this:

1. Boil 4 cups of water.
2. Put a couple of tea bags into it and let them brew for about twice as long as "normal".
3. Pour that into a 2 quart pitcher.
4. Fill the pitcher with ice.
5. Pour into glass with ice.

Sweet tea adds anywhere from 1/2 to a cup of sugar to step 3. I generally do like my tea sweetened, but often, the sugar is pumped too high because the tea is really astringent and needs the sweetening in order to smooth over that flavor.

I dropped into my local tea shop and they actually had a little flyer making recommendations of varieties that make good iced tea. Taking that as a good starting point, I bought half a dozen varieties, some from the list and some I just wanted to try and have been drinking the resulting teas over the last couple of weeks. I'll be buying more from the list as I get through the first batch.

I bought:

• Hunan Black
• Formosa Choicest Oolong (which I drink regularly as a hot tea)
• Mauritius Black, which has a lovely vanilla note to it.
• China Black Special, which might be a bit too smoky for me.
• Big Red Robe Oolong
• Longevity Oolong

Along with messing with the starting teas, I've been trying varying levels of sugar and using other sweeteners as well. It's clear that some teas need far less sweetening, even to taste like "sweet tea", like the Mauritius, for which 3/4 cup was so overly sweet it made me want to gag. It was much better when I dialed the sugar way back.

The downside to iced tea as wine substitute is that iced tea doesn't keep very well. A day or so later, it's pretty nasty, but you can make a fresh pitcher really quickly, so I don't have a problem with that. The fact that this is true when iced tea is made from scratch, is why bottled iced tea kind of creeps me out. Exactly what stabilizing chemicals and preservatives are necessary to keep it in exactly the same state for months on end?

At any rate, I know that there are a lot of people out there who either stay away from alcohol for ethical reasons, personal reasons, or just for taste reasons, but really want to have a nice drink with their meals. Between Seven Cups, The Tea Source and Adagio Teas alone, there are hundreds of different varieties worth trying out as part of my quest. From deep earthy puerh's to light white teas, there's surely as much rich complexity there as there is in wine and iced tea can be elevated from just another nozzle on the soda fountain to a beverage suitable as part of any gourmet meal.