I wanted to try my hand at infusing tea into a liquor using some cold brewing, and after poling my coworkers for ideas/suggestions the thing I ended up going for was some Coffee Pu’erh infused Irish Cream! I actually made this a while ago but I’m lazy and just getting around to writing about it now…
The ‘infusing’ process was easy enough though; I poured a generous amount of Irish Cream into a mason jar and then dumped in around 20g of Coffee Pu’erh, sealed it up and gave it a good shake before popping it into the fridge to cold brew for like two days. After my infusion time, I just strained the mix through a cheese cloth to get all of the tea out and I was left with a still very, very rich and sweet Irish Cream liquor, just a touch darker brown with a kind of medium bodied coffee/almond aroma.
Now, I want to be clear that this was still super sweet/sugary – and it’s not an overwhelmingly strong coffee flavour overall the same way you get when you just drink the tea straight up; but it’s totally there and it adds a really nice sort of secondary flavour to the alcohol. You could absolutely do a lot of things with it; use it as creamer in coffee or an iced cap or something, pour it over icecream, use it in baking or something maybe? I don’t know – lots of uses. Of course, the other obvious use would be in cocktails or shots. I went for shots.
So, I also own some Kahlua Chili Chocolate liquor, so what I did was layer a shot glass 50/50 with the chocolate chili liquor and my Coffee Pu’erh Irish Cream infusion. I mean, chocolate, coffee, and Irish Cream is a pretty fucking solid flavour pairing as is and there’s no reason you can’t introduce that bit of spice to switch things up. The shot was great; sweet, creamy coffee/cream/chocolate and then that kick of chili heat in the finish that sort of pulls you away from alcohol burn towards, well, spice burn. Which I still think is better overall.
Photo: https://www.instagram.com/p/Be_qhMAllqH/?taken-by=ros_strange
Friendly reminder that I do not numerically rate DAVIDsTEA blends as I’m currently employed there and it would be an obvious conflict of interest. Any blends you see with numerical ratings were rated prior to my employment there. These reviews are a reflection of my personal thoughts regarding the teas, and not the company’s.