SummerTea

Summer is here - oh boy is it here. The summer is an all time low for hot tea sales at the teahouse I work at, so we're always looking for ways to please the customers. Of corse there is the classic iced tea, in both normal and flavored varieties. I recently had a customer ask me if we had sun tea. I had never heard of sun tea until this point, so I asked around until I found out what it is. Apparently people have been, for years, putting tea bags in water and throwing them out in the sun for the day. To me everything about this process is horrible. The correct way to make iced tea is this. Brew your tea exactly as you always would, but with twice the amount of tea leaves. Loose tea is always preferred. After that you just pour the tea over ice or throw it in the fridge - though literally throwing it is probably not preferred. 

There are several commercial iced tea makers such as:

• Tea Forte offers a brewing pitcher which works perfectly with their specially designed tea bags.
• Adagio offers a larger version of it's IngenuiTEA teapot for brewing iced tea.
• Mr. Coffee has an iced tea maker that heats the water for you, which may not be a good thing if you'd like to brew green teas.

While these iced tea makers come in handy and are surly nice to have they are in no way necessary. 

For the summer at the teahouse we also offer a green tea lemonade. It's my own personal recipe that I've included below, which yields one quart.

• Steep a dragonwell green tea with double the amount of tea leaves, combine with the following
  
• 1/2 cup of fresh squeezed lemon juice
  
• A bit less than 1/2 cup (or more depending on taste) of sugar or artificial sweetener

That's all for this entry, I'll be back with more soon!

TEAview - An Introduction

Thanks for stopping by TEAview. My name is Buchanan and I am the manager of a teahouse in North Carolina. Using this blog I will talk about the proper ways to brew tea, give some fun history lessons about tea, and review new teas I've tried. In other words, I'll talk about tea.

I look forward to posting here and sharing my knowledge with you!

-Buchanan