Sparkling Moroccan Mint Tea

July 22, 2013 By Kate Heyhoe

For Sparkling Moroccan Mint Tea, just add carbonated water (see below). I’ve made this with green, black, and flavored teas, and all are good. So pick your favorite tea as a base, then embellish from there. For stronger flavor, increase the loose tea to 3 tablespoons.

Moroccan Mint Tea Syrup

By Kate Heyhoe

Makes about 1-1/3 cups

3/4 cup sugar (5.5 oz/157g)
1/4 cup turbinado sugar (2 oz/56g)
2 tablespoons loose green tea (.3 oz/9g)
2 tablespoons dried spearmint (.15 oz/3g)
1/2 teaspoon citric acid (.1 oz/2g) (optional; see Tips)
1 cup water (8 fluid oz/250 ml)

Combine all ingredients in a small saucepan. Bring to a boil over medium heat, then remove from the heat. Let steep 5 minutes. Strain the syrup: Line a sieve with a dampened coffee filter and place over a large measuring cup or other container. Let cool to room temperature. Pour into a jar and refrigerate up to 2 months.

Tips: A coffee filter (or cheesecloth) dampened with water and squeezed out reduces the amount of syrup absorbed by the filter and helps the flow. Citric acid is a natural product; I buy it at the bulk spice aisle of natural and upscale markets, or in packages in Middle Eastern stores. A little dab will do ya, and it’s terrific in salad dressings and marinades. If you prefer, substitute with lemon juice or other citrus juice to taste.

Ideas: Sweeten hot brewed or iced tea, or add to lemonade. It also makes a good drizzle on fruit salads, melon, and green salads.

Sparkling Moroccan Mint Tea:

Mix 1 part syrup with 4 parts carbonated water, or to taste.

Coffee Lovers try this:

Iced Coffee Syrup for Sparkling Iced Coffee

Modern Rush: Ready-to-Drink Tea

May 27, 2013 By Kate Heyhoe

Ready-to-Drink Tea: A $3.5 billion market

Cold, Instant, and On-the-Go: How We Like Our Tea

More Americans go inside convenience stores to buy caffeinated beverages than for any other reason.

The tripod of modern living stands on three legs: Convenience, time-saving, and mobility. Just look at digital devices, fast food, and caffeine. Seattle became famous for its drive-through coffee spots. Coffee is a cash cow for McDonald’s and Dunkin’ Donuts. And now tea is beating out coffee and soda at some cash registers.

Caffeinated drinks – including coffee, iced tea, sodas and energy drinks – are what keep the local mini-mart in business, and what keeps their mobile customers on the go-go-go. Coffee’s hot all year, but in summer, iced tea sales soar.

Instant iced tea was the big 20th century boost for tea. It first entered the consumer market in 1953, and when Lipton Instant Iced Tea arrived in 1958, iced tea really took off.

When Snapple introduced bottled iced tea almost thirty years later, it created a whole new beverage category: Ready-to-Drink tea is now led by brands like AriZona, Fuze, Honest Tea, Sweet Leaf, and the giants Lipton and Nestea.

Bottom line: When tea became instant, sales took off. When it became cold, instant and ready-to-drink, tea joined the ranks of coffee and colas as a powerful caffeinated player – at least in the U.S. In Asia and other substantial portions of the globe, hot tea remains the main caffeinated beverage, but iced tea increasingly appeals to a young, cosmopolitan market.

U.S. Tea Sales Catching Up

Overall, tea is second only to water as the most widely consumed beverage worldwide, a fact often mentioned.

But did you know: More tea is consumed worldwide than coffee, chocolate, alcohol and soft drinks combined. After the American Revolution, tea’s popularity declined severely in the U.S. A hundred and fifty years later, specialty blends gave tea a big boost, especially Constant Comment in 1945 and more recent upscale brands like Republic of Tea and Tazo (now owned by Starbucks). Reports of the health benefits from tea’s antioxidants also kicked up consumption.

According to the Tea Association of the USA:

Approximately 85% of tea consumed in America is iced.
Over the last ten years, Ready-To-Drink Tea has grown by more than 17.5 times. In 2011, Ready-To-Drink sales were conservatively estimated at $3.50 billion
In 2011, over 65% of the tea brewed in the United States was prepared using tea bags. Ready-to-Drink and iced tea mix comprises about one fourth of all tea prepared in the U.S., with instant and loose tea accounting for the balance. Instant tea is declining and loose tea is gaining in popularity, especially in Specialty Tea and coffee outlets.
On any given day, about one half of the American population drinks tea. On a regional basis, the South and Northeast have the greatest concentration of tea drinkers.

As with coffee in the 20th century, the perception of “premium” quality gave tea traction. During the last fifty years, tea has been marketed as a special treat, bringing caffeine, pleasure, and reward to the tea-drinking brain.

So next time you pop into a mini-mart to pay for your gas, take a look at the 53 or so brands of tea in the cooler. Since ready-to-drink iced tea has brought a new level of passion to consumers, you’d be right to say it’s a really “hot” product.

Cool Trend of 1707: Teacups Get Handles

May 8, 2013 By Kate Heyhoe

If Kickstarter had been around in the 1700s, teacups with handles would have been a hot, hip crowd-funded campaign.

Chinese teacups don’t have handles. In the early days of Europe’s tea craze, fancy people kept burning their fingers on the cups. The Dutch and the Brits liked their tea hot enough to dissolve sugar and big enough to splash in some milk. But up until this time, most everyone lived on room-temperature ale, so scorched flesh wasn’t an issue.

From the get-go, tea was *the* trendy beverage of the wealthy – but people had a hard time figuring out how to drink it hot, yet gracefully. Along came porcelain handles to protect dainty digits from the heat.

But such things don’t happen overnight. For centuries the Chinese brewed their tea in the same cups they drank from. Later they invented teapots, using a durable “hard-clay” – a material strong enough to withstand scalding heat. But while these teapots had handles, the cups did not.

Tea Addicts Get Crafty

Back in Europe, the fresher the tea, the higher the price, and the bigger the frenzy. European clipper ships raced back from China with crates of fresh, loose tea. Some say the Chinese loaded teacups and teapots into the crates as ballast, cushioned by the tea. But really, the Chinese knew the value of their fine porcelains and designed teapots expressly for export, with spouts and handles, and pretty blue and white glazes so appealing to Europeans. They made sure their porcelain goods and tea arrived together.

Europeans saw a profitable industry in making their own teapots and cups. Unlike the Chinese tea “bowls,” they made cups with handles. But their soft-paste porcelain couldn’t withstand the shock of hot water as well as the Chinese hard-paste porcelain did.

German ingenuity came to the rescue in 1707. An alchemist by the name of Johann Freidrich Bottger mixed kaolin clay into his porcelain and solved the hardness issue, creating a new wave of European porcelain production, led by places like Limoges in France and Meissen in Germany.

Early Tea Accessories: There’s An App For That!

Like apps for ipad, tea accessories flourished. And like apps, they were fashionable and functional – until they were not.

Saucers were added first. Then came creamers, sugar bowls, tea trays, tea caddies, silver tongs, scoops, and storage jars. Bigger cups held more milk, larger saucers caught spills and held biscuits. European tea sets sported fanciful European woodland motifs and idealized faux-Asian scenes, full of romance but not reality. Teapots got supersized, compared to the demure Chinese pots, to service a whole family or social soiree.

Eventually tea became affordable and spread to the masses. Prestigious porcelain gave way to stoneware and earthenware. Cheap prices took the pizzazz out of tea’s upper crust rituals, along with silver storage containers and all the other specialized paraphernalia. (Not to mention the impact of teabags, a 1904 invention.)

From Nobility to Mobility

Today, we drink our tea both hot and cold, and Western teacups still have handles. But modern paper coffee cups don’t. Instead, they sport an invention just right for the go-go-go age: cup sleeves – which were invented in the early 1990s, about the same time that Apple’s first real laptop, the Powerbook hit the market, and Starbucks went public.

References:

A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World, by William J. Bernstein, Atlantic Monthly Press, N.Y., 2008

The Story of Tea: A Cultural History and Drinking Guide, by Mary Lou Heiss and Robert J. Heiss, Ten Speed Press, 2007

Orange-Spiced Tea with Organic Lime-Maté Boost

March 4, 2013 By Kate Heyhoe

Orange-Spiced Tea with Organic Lime-Maté Boost

Makes 1 serving; about 120 mg caffeine

by Kate Heyhoe

If you prefer tea to coffee and savory to sweet, this is the bumped-up brew for you. One cup packs more than twice the caffeine of regular black tea, with a balanced citrusy taste that’s neither bitter nor sweet. The sophisticated flavor is one that’s good to sip on, and the brew surpasses coffee when it comes to the morning jolt.

The Guayaki Yerba Mate Organic Energy Shot is a bit pricey at over $3 for 2-ounces, but you can use part of a bottle and refrigerate the rest for up to 5 days. It’s handy for customizing your buzz level: 1 tablespoon contains 35 mg of caffeine. (One 2-ounce bottle = 4 tablespoons, or 12 teaspoons). I like the flavor, and it doesn’t have that faux-sweetener aftertaste found in other energy shots.

In this recipe, orange-spiced black tea (like Constant Comment) meets half a bottle of Guayaki’s lime-tangerine flavored mate energy shot, which injects 70 mg of caffeine to the tea. Assuming an 8-ounce cup of brewed black tea contains 50 mg of caffeine, then this bumped up brew boasts a minimum of 120 mg of caffeine – more than in a cup of coffee.

Recipe:

1 (8-ounce) cup brewed orange spice black tea [about 50 mg caffeine]
1 fluid ounce (about 2 tablespoons) Guayaki Yerba Maté Organic Energy Shot, Lime Tangerine flavor [70 mg caffeine]

Stir the maté shot into the hot tea. Enjoy it plain or add sweetener as desired.

Note: The caffeine content of tea depends on many factors, including how long it’s brewed and the type of tea leaves. This book uses 50 mg of caffeine as an average for black tea, but one 8-ounce cup can range from about 15 to 75 mg.

EXCERPT from Caffeine Basics:

Product Profile: Guayaki Yerba Maté Organic Energy Shot, Lime Tangerine

A 2-fluid ounce bottle sells for around $3
140 mg caffeine
35 calories
USDA organic; fair trade certified, vegetarian, kosher
Main ingredients: organic yerba mate, goji berry, acerola cherry, and ginger (with purified water, citric acid, organic lime and tangerine extracts)
Sweetener: organic evaporated cane juice
Contains: 1670% of Vitamin B-12 RDA, 100% of Vitamin C RDA; antioxidants
NO: GMO’s, High Fructose Corn Sweeteners, Preservatives, Artificial flavors or Colors.
Also comes in Lemon and Chocolate-Raspberry flavors.

Tea = Code for Police in China

February 7, 2013 By Kate Heyhoe

In China, an invitation to tea in used to be a benign event. Now it may be risky.

Among Chinese dissidents – which typically includes journalists, artists, and free-thinkers – “to be invited for tea” has become a euphemism for being questioned by the police.

According to the BBC News:

The invitation comes from the authorities in the form of a phone call, and a knock on the door.

Those being invited range from celebrities who have expressed strong views on a topical issue to well-known dissidents and young people who get bold on the internet.

The questioning normally lasts a few hours – tea might or might not be drunk during the session. The security people will ask you about your activities and issue warnings to stop or face the consequences.

The book Encounters with the Police documents the experiences of 21 human rights activists and other people who were “invited to tea” as a form of police harassment. It’s written by Hua Ze, a journalist and documentary-maker, and Prof Xu Youyu, an outspoken political scholar. (More at the BBC)