Friday Fun Ingredient – Tea!

Today’s fun ingredient – Tea! The last time I brewed with tea was for the San Diego NHC in 2011. As part of the giant fleet of saisons that I made for the conference, I made the Jasmine Dragon Saison. It used one of my favorite teas – jasmine infused pearl green tea. Now this isn’t the same stuff I used in the Dragon, but a very similar tea made it’s way about 2oz (weight) of tea to a cup of vodka. That soaked and was shook for a business week and then strained. When the beer hit the keg, in went almost all of the tea extract. Here’s what a very similar tea looks like before soaking (images from here) When you make the tea normally (e.g. with hot water) it turns into this: It was beautiful stuff.Serious flights of angels type experience. Bright floral pop of jasmine, funky earthiness of the green tea blending in with Saison yeast. Wyeast 3711 in this case. The slickness of the yeast helped offset the little bit of tannin that was extracted as well. How much did I like this beer? Enough to drink a fair amount of it, despite having a low grade allergy to jasmine! The details are covered online here in Beer&Brewer Magazine out of Australia. Brewing with Tea. There’s plenty of uses for tea – I saw plenty of Chai Masala beers at SCHF – very popular stuff. What have you made with tea? What uses can you think of?