Alcohol-tea fusions finding their way into cans across Connecticut
For Jennie Ripps there is something almost mystical about tea. “There’s this kind of magic alchemy,” Ripps says of the ancient process by which hot water is transformed by herbs and minerals into a beverage rich with vitamins and antioxidants.
Ripps first became enchanted with tea while looking for a healthy beverage for a family member who was ill. “It was this kind of great moment in my life where I just couldn’t believe that I could put something in water and change the flavor, change its health benefits, change the color,” she says.
The Greenwich resident became a certified tea sommelier and started Brew Lab Tea with Maria Littlefield, who is from Litchfield. Ripps developed tea programs for top New York City restaurants such as Momofuko and Starr, and she was often asked to help incorporate tea into these restaurant’s cocktail programs. “There’s just so many ways that you can complement alcohol through teas,” Ripps says.
Wanting to bring that tea cocktail experience to a wider audience, Ripps and Littlefield launched Owl’s Brew, a sparkling boozy tea brand, in early 2020. At the vanguard of a small but growing hard tea movement, Owl’s Brew has made a splash, earning a feature in Forbes and winning gold for its Darjeeling Tea & Hibiscus Flowers flavor in the New York International Beer Competition’s brewed hard seltzer category in 2021.
The spiked teas have an herbflavor and champagne-like effervescence. Though light, they taste more like a cocktail than most hard seltzers on the market. While it’s currently billed as a “hard tea seltzer” the new
packaging this year will read “spiked sparkling tea.” My favorite is the spiced chai and cranberry, a wonderful canned cocktail with cinnamon and ginger notes against the chai and cranberry backbone.
The teas are contract-brewed outside of Connecticut. Finding a brewery for the brand was difficult because Ripps and Littlefield insisted that the product be made with real tea, and 19 breweries said they couldn’t do that, suggesting tea flavorings instead. “If you don’t fresh-brew the tea, if you only add (tea) flavor, you don’t get any of those health benefits,” Ripps says.
“You also lose a lot in terms of the actual flavor.”
The state’s craft beer community has also begun experimenting with teas.
The hard seltzer craze of the past few years has been so intense that Tyler Jones couldn’t ignore it. However, the head brewer, aka Lord of the Liquid, at Black Hog Brewing Co. in Oxford, didn’t want to produce just another run-of-the-mill seltzer. “I’m an artistic brewer at heart,” Jones says. “So I don’t like to follow the trends or do what everyone else is doing.”
As the Black Hog team explored how they could make a unique mark on seltzer, Jones started thinking about adding tea. “I played around with teas in beers in the past, and it always added a really nice kind of back note.”
Jones decided to use tea to power a new line of hard seltzer released as a separate brand from Black Hog called Hum Hard Tea Seltzer.
“The tea is giving you just a little touch of body, a touch of astringency,” Jones says. “The natural flavors that come off of those teas play off of the fruit we’re adding. The Earl Grey definitely has some dark cherry notes, so that’s why that’s in the black cherry one, and then green tea has really bright citrus — that’s why we did the tangerinelemon-lime blend with that one.”
Jones adds, “I’m using the tea like I would hops in beer, using the tea for its flavor.”
Jones is proud to be at the forefront of doing something different with hard seltzer. “We aren’t just fermenting out sugar water and adding extracts to it,” he says.
Ultimately, Jones expects the craze around hard tea seltzer to evolve. “I think the seltzer market will correct itself a little bit where the people who are just jumping on the bandwagon and trying to make bubbly water with fake flavoring in it will go away eventually,” he says. “In the early ’80s, when craft beer [became more popular], it didn’t matter what it tasted like. It was like, ‘Oh, this is craft beer. It’s in a brown bottle, it’s better.’ Then people’s palates developed and people looked for more nuanced flavors. I’m hoping that happens in the seltzer world too. They’re lighter, easier, a lot less flavors going on, but there’s some nuance between them and there is some complexity you can get out of it. We’ll get to more refined palates down the road and Hum will do well because of it.”
This article appears in the February 2022 issue of Connecticut Magazine. Sign up for our newsletter to get our latest and greatest content delivered right to your inbox. Have a question or comment? Email editor@connecticutmag.com. And follow us on Facebook and Instagram @connecticutmagazine and Twitter @connecticutmag.