The Tea Table
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Okay, it’s kind of pointless to pretend that this isn’t my new favorite iced tea when I just went out and bought a big bag of it, isn’t it? I guess it doesn’t matter how it tastes hot if I’m always making it iced!
Have some time-lapse photography!
http://www.flickr.com/photos/cait_tea/sets/72157623724833659/
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I noticed you’ve tried a number of teas from The Tea Table. A friend of mine at work has been ordering from them for years and turned me on to them. Expecting my first order shortly. I don’t see them mentioned much here, though so I was curious about your general impressions? Thanks!
I actually got a tea-of-the-month subscription to The Tea Table as a gift from my dad this year, which is how I have such a constant stream of them! So far I’m really pleased; I haven’t loved everything but I’ve loved several teas and enjoyed the range of tasting the others. There’s been something from each type of herbal/green/oolong/black that I’ve tried so far which has been great, so that’s probably a pretty good sign for the company.
Good to know, thanks!
Okay, this gets a bit more of a bump up. It makes a really nice cold-brewed fizzy iced tea!
Cold-brewed fizzy iced tea:
1. In a lidded glass carafe, put:
-* 2 liters cold seltzer water
-* 3 heaping teaspoons of Sun’s Up
-* 2 heaping teaspoons of sugar
2. Cuss while running for the sink because you forgot that adding sugar to seltzer water makes it fizz up.
3. Clean the outside of the carafe.
4. Add another teaspoon of Sun’s Up to the carafe to replace what was lost in the fizzing up.
5. Put the lid on.
6. Put the carafe in the fridge.
7. Check on it periodically to watch it turn a gorgeous pink color.
8. For lunch the next day, put your tea basket over a tall glass and pour the iced tea through it to strain.
9. Sip contentedly, enjoying the coolness of the mint with the sharpness of the hibiscus and seltzer.
10. Eye the rest of the carafe greedily.
I love fizzy iced tea! I’ve only made it w/ root beer black though.
Oh, wow, fizzy root beer black iced tea sounds dreamy!
Yep, All the root beer goodness, no calories, no sugar, no artificial sweeteners =D
Mmmm sounds good. I’ll have to experiment with cold-brewing tea. Usually I just make the tea like I normally would with hot water, then add some honey and let it cool in the fridge.
The joy of cold-brewing is the seltzer. Well, and not worrying about steeping time. :) The problem, of course, is delayed gratification!
Thank you for the recipe. I’m going to have to try seltzer water next time I make iced tea.
I’m very excited to try it with the rootbeer tea you sent to me! :)
Bumping it up a few notches for making a nice iced tea. (Not, alas, fantastic enough to make me feel better about having shattered the top of my favorite glass teapot in steeping it.)
Iced, with a bit of honey during the brewing and a bit of sugar cooled, it gives a mint front with a rose hip kicker. And it’s very very pink. This would probably be a good party drink!
Oh no! FataliTEA!
It was tragic! Although not as tragic as it could have been, given that neither dropped the pot itself nor stepped on the broken glass (of course I was barefoot — does glass ever break when I’m in shoes?).
I made tea in shorts this summer and spilled boiling water on my leg (I’m in a wheelchair so the sitting position makes my legs a great target). I still have the scar.
Eep! Tea is a dangerous sport sometimes, isn’t it?
First of March’s sample set!
Hmm. This is tasty, but there are mouth-pucker throat-burn levels of tanginess here. Perhaps I’ll try shorter steeps, or more honey.
Edited to add: Weirdly, adding copious amounts of honey to the second steep brings the mint way, way out — it’s like an entirely different tea! A far too sweet tea, unfortunately. Now I shall have to hunt for a happy medium….
Preparation
Oh my. I lump “oolong” and “green” together in my mind most of the time, but this tea may just force me to accept finer distinctions. This is an absolutely delicious tea, very sweet and flowery, and not at all what I expect when I think of green tea. Oolong, huh.
ETA: And it’s definitely getting juicer with resteeping. Interesting!
Preparation
While there are green and dark oolongs, oolongs are definitely not greens no more than cooked Pu Erh is a black tea. I wish tea companies would educate themselves enough to not misinform their customers, that happens a lot w/ cooked pu erh/blacks. Now if I can just figure out what yellow tea is- I’ve seen it lumped into the white, green, and oolong categories.
Wikipedia suggests that yellow comes from a post-oxidation process, so perhaps it can be applied to a variety of teas that would otherwise be white/green/black?
Oh, cool, check this out:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/47/Teaprocessing-small.png
Freakin sweet!
I don’t like that they don’t call pu erh by its name, but oh well.
Hmm! My tea-of-the-month subscription is supposed to be one black, one green, and one herbal each month, but last month was a black-and-green blend, a fruit tea, and this tea, so I’m not sure how that works out (maybe one black-and-green blend and one oolong are equivalent to one black and one green? grin) — unless what I have isn’t the “variety” but the “surprise me” subscription, and I can’t seem to find the “you’ve got tea!” notice that came with it to check…. On Tea Table’s website, at least, green and oolong are not conflated at all.
Tried this as an iced tea again. It’s strong enough this time, but the flavor is…odd. You sip and it’s strawberry immediately, but then that’s gone and you’re drinking water — but when you’re done, there’s a lingering taste of kiwi. Alas, I think this one is not to be.
My first thought when I opened this packet of tea was: doesn’t my girlfriend have this lip gloss?
So it definitely smells like artificial fruit. A lot of things do; it’s pretty much impossible for anything but actual fresh strawberries to smell or taste like fresh strawberries, and I also like fruit flavoring as its own thing. I don’t smell kiwi particularly, but there’s definitely something mixed with the strawberries.
Steeped, the tea is the color of strawberry dessert topping. I find this amusing.
Sipped, it feels like fruit tea, one of those really tart (but not at all sour) ones that roughs up your mouth on the way through. It’s the sort of feel that makes it hard to taste anything, although it definitely leaves the lingering impression that actual fruit has come this way. The taste isn’t artificial at all.
You know, I don’t brew a lot of my own iced tea, but this tea does stand out as one that could be really good iced, served very cold and a bit weak with a small amount of sugar. I’m not going to try it — I don’t know if I can really express how little the weather suits iced tea right now, but go ahead and google “north american east coast blizzard 2010” if you’re curious — but I will keep it in mind!
YUM! I bookmarked “Cait’s Cold-brewed fizzy iced tea” recipe – I’m going to have to try it. Looks delicious!