How to Make Ice Tea
Welcome to our "How to" Tea article - "How to Make Ice Tea". While this may seem straight forward to some people, making iced tea can be a bit of a puzzle.
Rest assured, it is easy to make delicious ice tea at home. Once you have tasted homemade ice tea, you won't want to drink prebottled or instant ice tea again. Here are the basics for making ice tea at home.
How to Make Ice Tea Basics
There are a few kitchen utensils you need to gather together before you get started. Here is what you will require to make up a pitcher of ice tea.
- Measuring Cup
- Wooden Spoon
- Tea Kettle
- Glass Pitcher
Once you have these items assembled, you need to get your ice tea ingredients together.
- Tea - see first paragraph after this list
- Sugar or Sweetner
- Lemon or Other Garnish
- Lots of Ice Cubes
When choosing a loose tea to make your ice tea, you can really use any type of tea, BUT there are some excellent loose tea blends that are specifically blended for making iced tea.
Adagio has two very nice tea blends specifically created for making ice tea at home:
Teavana also has a few preblended teas that are recommended for making ice tea at home as well. Here are their signature tea blends:
Any of these blended teas make excellent iced tea of the highest quality, and the
Teavana Himalayan Majestic Black Tea
is a great base tea for more advanced ice tea creators who want to start infusing their own flavors, spices and herbs into their creations.
Okay a little note about sweetners, honey is my sweetner of choice when making iced tea, but you can use white sugar, brown sugar or a sweetner like splenda etc to your ice tea.
Instructions for Making Ice Tea
Now that we have covered off the basics and given you some excellent teas to try, lets get to the basic recipe for making ice tea.
How Much are you Going to Make? Ice tea should be consumed on the day it was made. It really doesn't keep well. So lets assume that you are going to make 4 cups of ice tea.
- 4 cups (32 ounces) of fresh water
- 4 teaspoons of your tea of choice
Boil your water, once boiled steep the tea for 4-6 minutes depending on the strength you desire for your finished tea. You can steep your tea in a large pot on the stove. (heat off though) while it is steeping.
Next add your sweetner (honey, sugar etc) to the hot tea. Now you let it cool, after about 30 minutes, you can move your tea to a ice tea pitcher or container, do not add any ice at this point. Place the iced tea container in the fridge for 2 hours to complete cooling and become chilled.
Serving your Iced Tea
Okay here is the fun part. Take 4 tall glasses and fill them with ice cubes (the more the better). Add a lemon wedge, sprig of lemon balm, or a flower to the glass to make it 'pretty'.
Pour your ice tea over the ice and serve immediatley.
There you have it, the basic instructions and a complete How to Make Ice Tea article.
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