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.

A week or so ago, I noticed that Seven Cups Tea had some of the stuff I've grown to like, Rou Gui and I ordered some, along with a little bit of some other stuff I wanted to try. Fast forward to Tuesday, when a box arrived from them. I tore it open to find it full of the items that someone in Florida had ordered.

By the time I got around to contacting them yesterday, I had actually received the right order instead, with a note to not worry about the mixup. So, I now have 3 bags of green tea (which I don't typically enjoy: too grassy). I was sharing this dilemma with a tea-drinking friend and she mentioned cooking with it, which intrigued me. I've cooked lots of Coke/Pepsi, Dr. Pepper, coffee, etc. They are great ways to bring in complex flavors to both savory and sweet dishes.

She pointed me to a pretty cool site for cooking with tea, which looks like a really interesting starting point. It's also a great example of leveraging the web and engaging people with your product. Adagio Teas runs this tea recipe site, called TeaChef. Every month, they choose a tea out out of their catalog and ask participants to come up with recipes for it. They offer free samples to help in that endeavor. They collect the recipes and, after ranking them, etc. present them on the site.

It's a pretty innovative way to engage people and get them excited about a single product that they sell. I'd love to see the sales figures for the selected teas following their feature. I'd be really surprised if there's not a huge spike.

Now, which recipe to try first . . .

Back at the end of college, I developed an ulcer from all of the coffee I was drinking (think 1 gallon+ per day) and was told by the doctor that I needed to ditch the bean if I wanted to avoid that nasty burning sensation in my belly. I went cold turkey (and actually got sick from withdrawal), but managed to get off of it.

However, drinking a hot beverage had become part of my life and, like every cigarette smoker who ends up chewing on pens, I sought out a replacement and started drinking tea. I've been doing so ever since

This week, I discovered a new site that sells tea they import directly from the farms in China and placed a sampler order.

As part of my order from Seven Cups, I bought some of their Li Li Xiang 2005 oolong tea.

A quick tea "primer" for those not familiar. Real tea (not the herbal stuff) is the leaf from the Camellia sinensis plant. If you pick it when the leaves are just young shoots, you get white tea. If you pick the leaves and just dry them, you get green tea. If you dry them and let them ferment a bit, you get oolong. If you let them ferment more, you get black (or red) tea, which is what most Britons and Americans are used to.

Black tea is what I mostly drink (until now), mostly because I'd never had really good oolong aparently. I've tried green on a regular basis, because I want to like it. However, every variety I've ever tried has this "grassy" note to it that I just can't get past. All I can think of is the smell of sileage (chopped alfalfa fed to farm animals) when I drink it.

Oolong intrigues me because it's a middle ground and this particular oolong (and I suspect many of those from Seven Cups) are exactly what I've been looking for. This stuff is really good and it's actually their cheapest oolong. It doesn't have any of that grassy flavor, but isn't bitter or astringent at all. It's marvelously complex and I suspect my 2 quart thermos will be empty before noon today.

So, here are a few photos of what I got and what it looks like.

Bag of oolong

Dry oolong from the bag

After steeping this morning's tea.

You can see that, as opposed to the nearly ground-to-a-powder stuff that sits in tea bags, we're definitely talking about big leaves here.

I don't have a shot of the tea itself because I don't drink from a white mug (which is what you'd have to do to see the brew properly), but might put some in a clear glass tomorrow, just to get a shot of it.

I also found it funny/interesting that the packing material was Chinese newspaper, surely a better sign of good tea than newspaper from Topeka.

That little bag was $8.50. That may seem steep (no pun intended), but lets you drink some of the best tea around for way less than Starbucks. Don't make the mistake of comparing this to your grocery store tea. Compare it to what you pay for a high priced beverage, because you're getting quality that's worth it.