Flash Chill Iced Tea Maker

I’ve owned two of these so far and have been putting them through daily use for the past three years. I’ve yet to find a better way to easily brew large amounts of iced tea from loose leaf. The filter is particularly fine and even does a decent job with roobois. It’s also large enough for most teas to expand but compact oolongs and pureh seem to get a bit cramped. When brewing with hot water be sure to not close the lid all the way as this will cause pressure to build.

I have had minor problems both my fault. One of these sadly bit the dust after a particularly nasty fall that busted open the plastic. These can usually take a drop but the plastic had already been compromised from being used to make cocktails where the limes were placed in the pitcher and smashed with a wooden spoon. This caused hairline cracks to form so don’t smash things in there… The other one now has some of the pour spout chipped off from another drop on to a tile floor when completely full of tea. This has compromised the already finicky pouring. Also, I’ve gotten a lot of tea buildup on the filters and the pitchers itself. Baking soda works decent but it might be time to get some of that magic tea soak I’ve been hearing about since it’s hard to clean inside the narrow filter.

I got this about 5-6 weeks ago from David’s Tea, and have used it almost non-stop since. It turns out the hubby likes iced tea! This works well both for flash chilling with hot water and ice, and also for cold brewing. However, I do have a few caveats:

- When pouring, the spout is a bit splashy, especially if the pitcher is nearly empty.
- The plastic retains smells very easily. This doesn’t affect the taste of the tea any, but when the pitcher and filter are washed out and drying, you can definitely smell a lingering smell of previous iced teas.
- The pitcher is VERY tall. There is only about one space in my fridge where I can have it stand upright, which is on the fridge door next to the milk.

I have a couple of 2L Takeya iced tea jugs that are sold at T2 in Australia as “T2’s The Jug”.

The original 2L jugs had filters that weren’t nearly long enough for the jug, and to be honest they weren’t quite big enough for fruit tea ingredients to make a full 2L jug either. Thankfully the company seem to have learned quickly from this error and the new jugs come with much longer filters. I’m not sure if T2’s jugs are quite the latest version as the filter in my new jug purchased in December 2013 still doesn’t reach as far down as the one on Takeya’s website shows, but it’s still great and does the job.

I would have been happy with just my black one but I couldn’t resist the beautiful limited edition light blue one and I have to admit having two is excellent over summer. All iced tea all the time.