Choosing the right bag for the job
Tea drinking is a lifestyle, but how to enjoy tea without the heat in summertime? The simple answer is adding ice into hot tea to turn down the temperature, or chilling the tea in the fridge. But there are flaws with these two solutions: The ice used to cool down the tea will also dilute the beverage, and it takes quite a few hours for the tea to cool in the fridge as hot items are not supposed to be put in there right away.
Luckily, there are simpler ways to enjoy tea minus the heat and without compromising on the flavor.
Cold brew tea
Cold brew tea has been the trending beverage for a few summers, and with good reason.
First, it’s a simple one-step, one-ingredient recipe of dropping tea bags into room temperature water and chilling in the fridge overnight. The next morning, a refreshing tea drink is ready to be enjoyed with breakfast or on the go.
To choose the right tea product for the job, we start from the materials used to make the tea bags. Traditional flat, rectangular tea bags are made of filter paper.
They are fine when steeped in hot water and be removed after a few minutes, but keeping the tea bags in water for hours can be a challenge and there’s a good chance of all the loose tea dropping into the water and ruining the beverage, which of course can be saved by filtering through a coffee filter but that’s just extra trouble.
Silken tea bags in a pyramid shape are often used in better quality tea products and they are made of stronger material. The tea packed in silken tea bags are larger whole leaves, dried flowers and bits of dehydrated fruits, and the pyramid shape provides more room for the large leaves to expand. They are especially suitable for making cold brew tea that needs to sit for hours.
Any sealed bottle can be used to make cold brew tea, from glass water jugs to bottled water. If you worry about removing the tea bags from the bottle in order to sort the garbage (the bottle is recyclable but the bags are dry garbage), I’ve tried to pull out the silken tea bags from regular bottle water and they didn’t break apart, simply be patient and squeeze the tea bags gently to compress the shape. The paper tea bag, however, was messier and easier to break.
I’ve tried several types of tea in my cold brew tea experiment and my favorites are fragrant, lighter teas such as oolong, peach and oolong, osmanthus, and oolong and jasmine. The bold-flavored black teas like pu’er are better suited for making hot tea as cold brewing would not bring out their unique flavors, whereas the more aromatic oolong teas can present the distinct flavor clearly in cold water.
Coffee peel tea is a unique ingredient made of the dried peel of coffee beans, it has a surprisingly sweet and sour, plumy taste and can be brewed in both hot and cold water. The product is sold by some coffee shops on Taobao.com and the search keyword is
To elevate the cold brew tea concept and make it fancy, you can switch to sparkling water and soda, and the results are stunning.
I first tried sparkling tea at a Table for Eight dinner hosted by Li Wenye last summer when they did tea pairing with the Modern Chinese cuisine concept. It was so refreshing and had a champagne-like color that could pass off as an alcohol-free welcome drink for formal dining settings.
It takes less time to make sparkling tea than regular cold brew tea, as the carbonic acid accelerates the process of infusing the