Fun and FlirTea

What’s more American than boozing? And tea? Boston Tea Party, anyone?

AMIRITE!?

In honor of the U.S. rebellion against Britain, I’m combining the heart of part of that rebellion with a key factor of what it means to be an American today. Getting hammered!

So here’s a step-by-step guide to making your own tea-infused vodka!

1. Start with a fifth of nice, unflavored vodka (750 mL) and 6 teaspoons of your black tea of choice (flavored or unflavored). I used a bottle of Absolut and a very nice Yunnan black tea I picked up in Dali, China. The nicer the vodka and the tea you use, the cleaner tea flavor you’ll get in the finished product. I’m totally going to try this again in future with a flavored tea and will definitely let you know how it is.

2. Pour the tea into the bottle of vodka. If you’re like me and don’t see the point in owning a funnel, use any old piece of shit junk mail you’ve got lying around. In my case, I fucking hate Comcast and their (lack of good) customer service, so I picked up one of their adverts without regret!

3. Let that sucker sit and stew for around 18 hours.

4. Strain that shit. Like a boss.

5. Clean out the bottle and pour it back in.

6. Optional: You can keep it straight up or add some simple syrup to taste. I prefer to keep mine unsweetened, because it’s easy to sweeten each drink individually as you make them.

7. Mix it up with some lemonade and enjoy what I like to call a Drunk Golfer!

The best part about it is how straight easy and cheap it is to do this. The bottle cost under $20, and the tea, well… you know just as well as I do that the pricing can vary depending on which tea you landed on. The time it takes you to put this together (not counting the 18 hour infusion time) is super minimal and anyone can do it!

After tasting it and agreeing that it’s delicious with a clear, tasty tea flavor, Briana and I have decided that our next step will be to make “Moroccan Tea Rum” for the best mojitos ever. More on that when we’ve had a chance to make it happen! In the meantime, I’ll just enjoy my black tea vodka!

Photography
First two images by Dinah, the rest are by the fabulous Briana Morrison.
For more photos from this experiment, check out Briana’s post here.

Pu-erh (pronounced poo-arrrrrrrrrrrrr) tea is probably the least known type of tea to the everyday person. Not all that long ago (just a couple years now), my brother living in China sent me an email asking about the kinds of tea I liked and what he had available to him. He mentioned pu-erh tea in this email and I had no idea whatsoever what he was talking about.

My first stop, naturally, was Wikipedia. They do have a pretty decent page on this tea type, but it didn’t really answer most of my questions. For one thing, I still mentally pronounced it more like the word “pure” than “poo” and “arrrrrrrrrrr”. It mentioned that pu-erh tea is pretty frequently pressed, but I didn’t really understand what that meant without ever having seen a pressed tea before. The only thing I really retained from the Wikipedia page was that it was fermented in some way, shape, or form.

I guess that since I wasn’t familiar with how tea was made up to this point, this didn’t make much impact on me. In fact, at the time I still sort of assumed that each tea type came from a different plant. Now that I know more, I just enjoy understanding what these differences really mean for the tea.

To begin with, instead of the oxidation that the other tea types undergo, pu-erh tea really is actually fermented. The real difference is that oxidation is a chemical process and fermentation involves microbes (like you’ll find in cheese or yogurt). I remember one day at work, I was preparing some pu-erh tea from a compressed brick. A coworker asked what it was and I explained that it’s a type of tea, but it’s fermented. His immediate response was, “Oh. So how much alcohol is in it?”

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