TeaChat

I've started to cold brew teas/tisanes and made this list to keep track of them:

Assam Banaspaty: Interesting fruity taste but a too weak. 5/10
Da Hong Pao: Ok, but too weak taste. 5/10
Lung Ching Shi Feng: A little bitter. 6/10
Osmanthus Oolong: Quite awful, I didn't finish this. 2/10
Rooibos with dried orange peels: 7/10
Sencha: I'm not that into Japanese greens but this was quite nice. 8/10
Sencha + Gyokuro: Nice and refreshing. 8/10

What is your exact method?

I just put some tea in a bottle and fill it with cold water, then I put it the fridge for a couple of hours.

Sencha produces a nice cold brew tea in a couple of hours. I find that oolongs like Taiwan rolled ball greener oolongs need to steep overnight. These are my 2 favorite cold brewed teas.

After many failures, I tried again, and....

I *can* enjoy cold tea. Not quite iced, in this trial, but cold. It was 100 degrees today and I was not enjoying my hot tea as much....

I started with some nice Alishan Oolong. I put the dry leaf in my cup, added cold water from the tap, and put it in the fridge for about 6 hours.

Then I drank it, and it was good!

I think the key was the quantity: instead of using more tea per volume of water than I would normally for hot tea, as I've often seen suggested, I actually used the same, but it seemed like less.

For a 16 oz cup, I used the amount of tea I would normally use for my 2 oz gaiwan, about 1 gram, keeping in mind that this particularly lovely tea will easily yield 8-10 infusions from that quantity in the gaiwan (making a total of 16-20 oz of hot tea). So I used the same amount of tea that I would use to make that volume of hot tea, but since it was not done gongfu style and was brewed in the cup, it looked like a lot less.

Happy camper, me!

debunix wrote:After many failures, I tried again, and....

I *can* enjoy cold tea. Not quite iced, in this trial, but cold. It was 100 degrees today and I was not enjoying my hot tea as much....

I started with some nice Alishan Oolong. I put the dry leaf in my cup, added cold water from the tap, and put it in the fridge for about 6 hours.
Then I drank it, and it was good!
Happy camper, me!

Good For you Debunix. A willingness to try new things was the first step.
Iced Tea Man!