brewing tea for cocktails & punches

brewing tea for cocktails and punches

Brewing tea for cocktails and punches is not very different from brewing your daily cuppa but it still requires some explanation. Just follow these quick and easy tips for a brew that is perfect for your creation.

Brewing time and the strength of the brew

You’ll always need a medium to strong brew for mixing. Black tea for instance can be brewed for anything in between 3 to 5 minutes, but for cocktails and punches a minimum brew of 4 minutes to a maximum of 5 is recommended. Since ice is added to most cocktails and punches, the dilution of ice will bring down the strength of the tea. So a stronger brew is required to still pick up the characteristic notes of the tea in the drink, especially when fresh brewed hot tea is used directly in the preparation of the drink. When brewing green tea and Oolong tea it is recommended to use a maximum brew of 2.5 and 3 minutes.

Measures

The amount of tea in relation to the water varies from sort to sort. There are guidelines for every tea and leaf grade but it is mostly up to your own preference. Playing around with different measurements and brewing times will ultimately get you your best result. To give you some standard to work with 2.5g of tea in 200ml of water is recommended for finer grades of tea while up to 3.5g of tea to 200ml of water is used for the larger leaf grades.

The importance of water

For a quality cup of tea, besides the best tea leaves, good water is an obvious necessity. But what is considered to be ‘good’ water for tea? There are numerous different kinds of water from a great range of sources, all with a specific content of minerals. In general, water can be divided into three groups:

Spring water: water from a natural or underground well, may come from different sources, with an undefined mineral content.

Mineral water: water from a natural or underground well, comes from one source, bottled at the well with a defined mineral content.

Drinking water: water that is fit for human consumption. Every source of water on earth has its own specific content of minerals, metals and sulphates.

Although the water in all three groups mentioned above is good to drink, a lot of it is unfit to brew a quality cup of tea.