One of the best things in life is a tall, cool glass of iced tea on a hot day. I love hot teas, but iced tea is just so refreshing and energizing that I can’t help but prefer it 9 times out of 10. I have a few iced tea recipes in my head, and a lot of the time I never measure anything out, but my boyfriend wanted to learn how to make my go-to iced tea recently. You might remember his aversion to tea, but he’s coming around, and I thin iced tea is what finally did it. I’m going to share the recipe that made him start to like tea, and I hope you let me know if you liked it!
Boil some water in a kettle or in a pot on the stove, and then take it off the heat—for every liter of water, use 3 teabags (or about 1 tablespoon of loose tea). It doesn’t really matter what tea you use, but I like to stick to black teas or fruity teas when I know I’ll be sharing it with other people. Good options to consider are peach teas or berry teas, and those are widely available nowadays even outside of specialty tea stores.
Once you’ve added your tea to the water, let it steep for a few minutes. How long you let your tea steep depends on how strong you like your tea, but I recommend not steeping for any longer than 4 minutes. Let everything cool until you can pour it into a pitcher, and then just cover and refrigerate.
Iced tea is actually very easy to make, everything else is just an addition to the base recipe. You can throw in mint, lemon, lavender, spices, rose petals, and even rose water for new flavours! For hot-brewed teas, it’s important to sweeten the tea while it’s still hot, unless you have liquid syrups on hand. I’ll share my favourite sweet tea recipe in the next post, but in the mean time, I hope you try out this basic iced tea recipe!
