Brewing tips that make the most of tea time

The sweet upside to the blazing Texas summer heat is that it’s an excuse to guzzle all the iced tea you can get your mitts on. But warning: Not all iced tea is created equal.

This week we’re going to look at the best and worst methods for making iced tea, and (hopefully) assuage some guilt for people who prefer their tea sweet in this era of sugar vilification.

Let’s start by tossing out that sun tea jar once and for all. Sure, sun tea is a time-honored tradition, but it’s a glass half-full for a couple reasons.

The first is flavor. Most black teas perform best in boiling water, while more fragile green-tea leaves steep well around 160 degrees. The sun will, at most, heat water to about 130 degrees. At such a low temperature, it will take hours to extract any flavor from the tea, and the result almost always will be a relatively insipid brew compared to a hotsteeped tea.

That temperature creates another problem: Sun tea just isn’t safe, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Temperatures below 140 degrees provide an ideal growth environment for a particular type of bacteria, Alcaligenes viscolactis, potentially present in both water and tea leaves.

If you insist on making tea

without first boiling a pot of water, there is a safe way to do it that yields the lighter, mild taste of sun tea, according to noted food researcher and writer J. Kenji López-Alt of seriouseats.com.

Fill that jar with water and tea like you always have — he suggests four teabags per quart of water — and place it in the refrigerator. The cold water, given

about five hours to steep, will result in a tea with a clean, mild flavor he found superior to traditional sun tea.

There is a science to making the best batch of iced tea.

One common complaint about iced tea made with boiling water is that it comes out cloudy — a result of tannins released from the tea leaves when cooled too rapidly or chemicals or minerals in the water, according to Iowa State University. For the best results, the Cook’s Illustrated team has come up with a simple and effective method of extracting maximum flavor and minimal bitterness from tea.

Start by making a tea concentrate. Steep your tea (six to eight bags or up to 3 tablespoons of loose-leaf tea, depending on how strong you like it) in 3 cups of water at 195 degrees — it took two minutes for water heated to a rolling boil to cool to 195 degrees at room temperature when I tested it with a thermometer — for four minutes. Then add 1 cup of ice water and continue steeping for another hour. Remove the teabags (or strain out the loose leaves), and pour the concentrate (you will have 4 cups) into a pitcher with room to dilute it.

If you’re a fan of sweet tea, stir in the sugar until completely dissolved. Then add water and ice to dilute the concentrate to your liking. I like fairly robust iced tea, and typically add only another 4 cups of water and ice to make a half-gallon, although you could dilute further.

Summer is the time to tea up, sweet or not.

Glasshouse Images / Getty Images When making iced tea, slowly cooling hot-steeped tea will extract the most flavor from tea bags.