Something different: Himalayan wine tea

Months ago, I acquired some of the intriguing Himalayan Wine Tea from Darjeeling TeaXpress — part of their occasional "exotic" offerings — and it was certainly worth seeking out and raving about. This being January, they're out of stock now, of course, but the seller says they'll order more after this year's second flush. Nonetheless, the tale ...

The Himalayan Wine Tea came with this explanation: "A very unusual tea – which is best served with wine. Mellow yet bold with a strong after taste, it provides a melody of hints in your palate that can only be manufactured in Darjeeling. If Darjeeling is considered to be the champagne of teas, then this is the true champagne of Darjeeling. The Reddish/coppery cup that is generally associated with autumn flush Darjeeling creates a complex taste in your mouth. This variety is highly recommended for wine lovers."

The tea itself brewed up exceptionally strong — my kinda tea — and alarmingly hearty, dark, and yeasty. Dry, it reeked of dark chocolate. In the cup, it smelled like the tea you make while traveling — in the hotel-room coffee maker that, try as you might, you can't wash the coffee taste out of. But not as bad as that sounds. It was high in tannins, and closed with a bold but not appalling bitterness couched within a surprisingly smooth, chocolatey rush. It really wouldn't be bad on its own. In fact, this might actually be a tea to pair with tira misu, or make it with!

Initially, I wasn't sure what to make of the "served with wine" instruction. I had to know more, and I wrote the company for details. The response: "This tea is originally produced by Goomtee plantation - aimed for their Japanese customers who pair it with wine. The flavour/taste profile of it makes it an excellent companion. But not everyone would like this combination, I have been warned by our tasters - so I would highly encourage you to try that. The Japanese drink it with their traditional Japanese wine, most prominent among them is Yamanashi red wine. I personally have not tasted that wine yet, but a mild red wine would pair well."

I first tasted the tea paired with a medium-bodied Louis Jadot beaujolais. Alternating the slightly chilled red with the warm-to-hot tea was an oddity on the tongue, but once a rhythm was found between tea, wine, and nosh, a cocoa-y undertone seemed to establish itself and enhance certain foods (veggies, no; meats, oh yes). I tried another pot later with a stronger wine, am Australian shiraz, which seemed to fare even better — the chocolate tones embracing each other instead of dueling, and bringing out each other's best qualities (muskiness in the tea, an aged quality in the wine).

For kicks, on the first tasting, I tried going one further: I poured the remaining cool tea directly into my half-full glass of beaujolais. The aroma was extraordinary — baking currants, sage, cumin, as if a dessert recipe had been made savory — though the taste was less exciting — thin, of course, and a slight balsalmic flavor, maybe even lime and/or mint, like a wine mojito. Bizarre.

Spiking the spiced tea

If you're not a new reader here, you know this is not a teetotaling tea blog. Many's the post singing the praises of whiskey and black tea — great highballs, even my homemade chai liqueur — and over the holidays I found myself repeating a simple routine that returned much happiness.

Ahead of the season, I'd ordered the Christmas Tea blend from TG. I don't do blends much anymore (one of my few tea-snobbish allowances) but I thought some visitors might enjoy it during the seasonal merriment. It being a decent blend — black teas mixed with vanilla pieces, citrus peels, cloves a hint of nutmeg — I started making some afternoon pots around the house. Inevitably, I wouldn't get too far through the pot before it went cold. So as the cocktail hour approached one evening, I dropped a slug of whiskey into a cold cup of the Christmas Tea. Pow! The flavors popped, putting on a united front in a way they hadn't before. I started purposely pouring and ignoring the pots. I've done this with chais and other similar, spicy teas, to similar effect, but not with the zing this particular blend delivered. Forget the name, this will be a seasonal warmer through the equinox.

Tea and whiskey highball

In cooler months, my transition from afternoon into evening occasionally goes like this. As afternoon tea wanes, I return to the last dregs of work that must be tended, and the black tea in my cup or certainly that remaining in the pot loses its heat. Finishing my labors, I take the tepid or cold cup to the bar and splash some whiskey or bourbon into it. Then I start thinking about a real cocktail and dinner.

The marriage of tea and whiskey cleans up good, as my dad used to say, and isn't seasonal. Chow offers up a superb recipe for a Tea and Whiskey highball that I tried this weekend. It's basically a well-blended twist on a julep and a sour. Given the cool-down and the syrup prep, it takes some advance planning — but it's worth it.

The details suggest using Lapsang Souchong — using nothing but that might take the smoke a little far, though I recommend adding at least a pinch of it to a good black tea (my beloved Keemun worked swimmingly).

More tea cocktails

In contrast to my previous post about the poetry of tea temperance, here are a few notes about tea cocktails:

• Absolut Vodka, I'm pleased to see, has maintained its interest in tea infusions. I wrote a while back about the temporary and regional issue of Absolut Boston, a vodka flavored with black tea and elderflower. The Swedes have gone international with those flavors now plus a few more. Absolut Wild Tea keeps the tea and elderflower and adds apple and citrus. Bring on the cocktail recipes!

• In fact, here's one. Punches are all the rage in the world of mixology this season, and Lainie Sips recently posted a delicious-sounding punch recipe that utilizes Absolut Wild Tea underneath some oolong and gin (which almost always pair nicely). Book your spring party now.

• I tried a jerry-rigged version of this New York magazine "marTEAni" recipe recently. Without the time to make the Earl Grey-infused Tanqueray, I simply combined a bit of leftover, cold Earl Grey with another brand of gin on-hand. The two marteanis were still fabulous. I think.

Stay warm with cinnamon tea

A friend's tales of travel recently reminded me of a tasty cold-weather tea treat: canela tea. On a hiking trip in Ecuador, he paused along a trail and chewed leaves right off a fragrant, red cinnamon tree; higher on the peak, his guide boiled water and served tin mugs of canela (cinnamon) tea. These were the same mountain paths once explored by Columbus and his followers; they were as desperate to find spices like this as they were to find gold.

This is an herbal infusion, of course, though it's not unheard of to include some black tea. Canela tea is about as simple as things get: boil water, throw in cinnamon sticks, simmer till it's good and brown. Sweeten to taste. Easy peasy. (Don't try ground cinnamon, no matter how well you think you can filter the results. Also, if you want to take it up a notch, hit the specialty market for "Mexican cinnamon" or "canela," which will be looser and not as tightly curled as the American spice-rack variety and thus will steep better.)

Here's a better, more considered approach from Sunset magazine: As above, boil water, add cinnamon sticks, simmer. Remove from heat, remove the sticks. Stir in honey and a wee bit of almond extract. Ladle into mugs, garnish with more cinnamon sticks. Highly recommended: amending each mug with tequila. Enjoy around a patio fire pit.

More tea cocktail news

1. The well-to-do foodies and mixologists are playing with pu-erh. I've recently been saving the cold leftovers from pu-erh pots and adding them to my occasional evening whiskey. Awesome. The Sun-Times food blog had this story recently about tea cocktails (featuring more from Rare Tea Cellar's Rod Markus). After lots of golly-wow about expensive pu-erh, it closes with this delectable recipe:

Peter Vestinos' Pu-Erh Cocktail
1.5 ounces Oronoco rum
1 ounce Blood Orange Pu-Erh Tea (brewed double strength)
1/2 ounce lemon juice
1/2 ounce apple cider (reduced by half on stove)
1/4 ounce simple syrup (sugar melted in an equal portion of water)
Shake and strain into a snifter and float a fresh basil leaf.

2. Last night, we toasted the arrival of fall weather — and the departure of summer's flavors — with the last summer cocktail. Usually, I enjoy Zen green tea liqueur simply over ice with a squeeze of lemon, but I saw an ad for it recently that included a simple cocktail ... which also matched the dregs in my bar last night: 2 parts Zen, 2 parts vodka, fresh orange juice. So long, summer.

3. I've had this link lying around for weeks to Tea Guy's post about UV's Sweet Green Tea Vodka. How many sweet tea vodkas are there now? Lots, but they're all black-based. Sweet green tea vodka, well, is pretty much what I mixed last night.

Tea smokin' in Carolina, and Lady Grey's drunk

Catching up on some magazines — found a couple of interesting features:

Food & Wine's Sept. issue has a profile of North Carolina chef Andrea Reusing. The writer launches the piece mentioning that he first heard of her when a restaurant co-worker asked him, "Have you heard about the woman in Chapel Hill smoking chicken over tea?" Loved by celebrities and rock stars as well as lucky locals, her restaurant, Lantern, is revered worldwide despite its relatively remote location. For her "legendary tea-smoked chicken," Reusing brines the birds in a spicy mixture, then uses a combo of rice, tea, spices and chile to smoke with. The full recipe is here. (The magazine previously interviewed her here. My Earl Grey-smoked pork roast meal, plus other tea foods, is here.)

Martha Stewart's Everyday Food mag (I'm not always crazy about her, but this is a nifty little monthly book full of some great simple recipes) this month had a recipe for a sweet tea cocktail — a mini-infusion, of sorts. The Spiked Berry is simply: Combine a cup of sliced strawberries, a cup of vodka and a bag of Lady Grey tea. Steep it an hour. In a pitcher, stir together a quarter cup of powdered sugar with a cup of fresh lemon juice. Toss the tea bag and pour the vodka mix into the pitcher. Yum.

New liqueurs for tea cocktails from Koval

This weekend we toured Chicago's new Koval Distillery, a craft still on the North Side. They make organic (and kosher!) spirits from a variety of grains, including wheat and oats but also spelt and millet. They make five different white whiskeys — clear, not aged, basically legal moonshine — from the different grains. Most of them are sharp and subtly flavorful, but in our tasting the Raksi Millet whiskey was the stand-out, the only one with any real smoothness and nutty flavor.


My reason for going, though, was to investigate the liqueurs. Koval makes five: rose hip, chrysanthemum honey, jasmine, ginger and coffee. These are unusual liqueur flavors and, as you might imagine, they are ideal for tea cocktails. We tasted the first three of those. Two were quite good — the rose hip utterly surprising, sweet and jammy and clean, and the jasmine really enchanting, with just the right floral notes. The chrysanthemum honey was unfortunately cloying, all honey and no blossoms. Pour the jasmine over ice with some Zen green tea liqueur and you've got one little piece of heaven, the perfect aperetif on either side of an Asian meal. The Koval site also has a recipe for Tea Koval, a simple cocktail of Earl Grey with the rose hip liqueur.

Koval distributes to Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Colorado, and Tennessee, plus these national online sellers.

Iced tea with lemon — or limoncello

Sam at Chicago's Tea Gschwendner was right. He suggested this during a tasting last summer, but I'm only now taking him up on it. With lilies and perspiration beads blooming around here, I have turned my tea consumption from the stove and more toward the icebox. And I remembered his tip: TG's North Indian Manjhee Valley makes an excellent iced tea. Ain't no lie. Brew a concentration of it, add to a pitcher was ice and an equal volume or two of water, chill. Top with a slightly muddled lemon slice, and that's good summer tea drinkin', folks.

If you really want to get your iced tea 'n' lemon on, make it an adult beverage. Top a tumbler of iced tea not just with fresh lemon but a jigger or two of limoncello (which is easy to make at home). It's an idea from the Stellina Cafe in St. Louis.

The chai of wine

President's Day — that's a holiday, really? I never remember that I'm off work to honor our leaders until the Friday before. So we never make plans for the long weekend, we just relish the sweet surprise of an extra day. Which is nice considering (a) it usually falls near Valentine's Day, (b) our anniversary is two days before that and (c) it's February in Chicago and good for hibernating at home. Which also means a few pots of tea will be poured. And a few cocktails. One of our favorite wintertime treats actually marries the two tastes.

It's called glogg, aka mulled wine, or spiced wine. The spouse is of Swedish decent, so when the goblet is raised here, we call for glogg. This weekend, in fact, we enjoyed a bottle of Vin Glögg from the nearby Glunz Family Winery in Illinois. It's beautiful, smooth stuff with a base of red wine and supplemented with port (!), citrus oils, nut oils, cloves, cardamom, nutmeg and cinnamon. Does that mix of spices sound familiar, tea lovers? That's why I call it "chai wine."

In fact, when I've made my own glogg before, I add black tea It really rounds out the flavor and gives the brew a bit of heft. Here's my time-worn recipe I have scrawled in my bar book (alas, unattributed):

1 bottle or merlot or cabarnet
1 cup orange juice
zest of lemon and orange
1 cinnamon stick
5 whole cloves
1/2 cup of brown sugar
2 tea bags (a basic orange pekoe will do)

Add everything except the tea to a saucepan. Simmer about 10 minutes (let it steam, but don't boil it). Remove the pan from the heat and drop in the tea bags. Steep 5-10 minutes. Strain and serve.

A summer cocktail for the winter blues

We're approaching the roughest part of winter here in Chicago — rough not necessarily because the weather is colder or snowier, but because we're not even close to the end yet. Serious winter chill clings to Chicago well into "spring," and I've seen plenty of Easter dresses fluffing from underneath heavy parkas on the steps of the church across the street from our place. T.S. Eliot has Chicago in mind when he observed the cruelty of April.

So it's about this time of year I begin turning to various tricks to keep my mind in a sunny spot. We risk the electric meter by blazing the lights in the house. I load the iPod with two able winter combatants: a lengthy playlist of reggae music (heavy on the Toots!) and a mix called "Africa Hot" of some African and Africa-inspired tunes. We also take breaks from winter soups and stews for the occasional citrusy salad (it is, after all, the citrus time of year). Same for beverages: enough black tea and whiskeys. I've really taken to a squeeze of lemon over ice and a light pour of Zen green tea liqueur. It's become my favorite cocktail this month, with a twist. Tastes like June. Tastes like I'm about to break a sweat touring the fields full of second flush. Tastes like something we'd drink on the lawn at Ravinia for one of their summer concerts.

Mind over meteorology, my friends.

Bar none

Janet B. wrote in response to my post about green tea liqueur and other spirits, asking about the photo of my bar.

It's one of my treasured possessions, I must say — and not because I'm a lush. It's an old Victrola cabinet. The antique record player was in my family, one of those pieces that was hauled around from attic to attic in every move. No one knew what to do with it or how to display it. My father once remarked offhand, "I'd love to pull the turntable out and make a bar out of it." When I moved into my first house, I lobbied for the Victrola to do just that. It was a great weekend project. Lifting out the turntable works was easy. I put down felt at the bottom of that well — voila, instant dry bar.

The cabinet below was slotted with about a dozen narrow shelves, each with a curved notch in the front, for storing the 78 rpm discs. I removed all but three of these, lined the remaining ones with felt, and that's where I store glassware. One of the shelves I cut in half and attached to the top on hinges — so there's a small surface area on top to work on, or to display a nice or new bottle.

There were still records inside the thing when I got it. Many of them — being early-century popular music from just before and after Prohibition — have cocktail-themed titles. In our current condo, I've hung several of them on the wall next to the bar: "The Alcoholic Blues," "Rent Party Blues," "The Moon Shines on the Moonshine," "Just a Little Drink (Fox Trot)," etc., plus the cover to Jackie Gleason's "Music, Martinis & Memories," about which my pal John Wooley wrote a stirring, sentimental essay in a book we published years ago about lounge music.

I'm not this crafty, really. Or maybe I am. It's a fitting tribute to my Dad. One his favorite quotations is on a small brass plaque I keep on top of the bar: "Leave the barroom walking backwards so they think you're coming in."

Please come back to Boston ... for the vodka

Tea may be my favorite beverage, but I'm no tea-totaler. I've written before about my vodka infusions, and this weekend I finally got a hold of someone else's. Three products, in fact ...

The Absolut vodka makers have started a line of city-specific flavors and recently unveiled the latest (after Los Angeles and New Orleans): Absolut Boston. What did they decide Boston tasted like? Black tea and elderflower. A shop in Chicago finally got a few bottles, so I had a taste. The verdict: ... tea? I can taste no tea in this at all. The elderflower, however ... wow. Straight out of the freezer (the only way to drink vodka, when it's the consistency of 10W-40) in two small cordials, the floral notes were mighty, and lovely. Smells and flavors of heavy rose, of menthol, of spearmint, with a slight blueberry finish. These didn't mellow much with time and warmth, and I never tasted anything resembling tea. I think, however, that this would make one of the best Cape Cods in cocktail history. (They have recipes and more on Facebook.) What do you think they'll flavor Absolut Chicago with? Hot dogs? Pizza? Old Style beer?



My other purchase at the lush store: Zen Green Tea Liqueur. I'd seen this arrive on back bars but hadn't yet tried it. Run, do not walk to do so. This is a winning concoction on every level. It's beautiful, a pale emerald green. It smells like a fresh cup of matcha (from which it is allegedly flavored). The flavor is fantastic — real tea notes, a slight astringency underneath a perfectly balanced sweetness. I really expected this to be too sweet; it's perfect. It was delicious (1) on its own, in a glass, (2) mixed with the Absolut Boston, to add the Green Monster to a Zentini, and (3) mixed with vanilla ice cream, which I did on a whim and immediately wished I had a supply of insulin so I could extend the experience all night long.

Finally, I made my own chai liquer. Same ol' vodka infusion method using simple syrup. When the sugar was completely dissolved, I threw in two cinnamon sticks, dashes of ginger, allspice, nutmeg, black pepper, three crumbled cardamom pods and a teaspoon of French vanilla extract. Then three scoops of black tea (Keemun in this case, figuring its natural spiciness would be perfect). Let it cool, strained it through a large sieve (to remove the tea leaves so they wouldn't get bitter), poured the rest of it into a half-empty (OK, half-full, you optimists) bottle of Lovejoy vodka. Let it sit in a cabinet for three days (could have gone much longer), then strain it twice with a fine cheesecloth. The result: a yummy cinnamon aperitif. The tea flavor gives it body, the syrup sweetness, and of all the spices it's the cinnamon that gets up and shimmies around your mouth. Now I just need to bake a few apples, and we've got one helluvan autumn dessert!

Summer, summer, summer (sangria!)

Glory be, summer heat has finally come to Chicago (after a peculiar season of bizarrely cool temps). Why? Because Lollapalooza is in Grant Park. Can't have that rock festival without breaking a few heat records. I'm on house arrest for work this weekend, reorganizing the tea cabinet and trying different tea cocktails with ice, ice, baby.

Here's a fave, courtesy the Mighty Leaf blog. They make a kinda cool line of teas called the Sangria Tea Collection. This is a perfectly plucky way to employ one of them:

White Tea Sangria
1 bottle of dry white wine
3/4 cup Peach Schnapps
18 oz. brewed Mighty Leaf White Orchard Tea (2 pouches)
1/4 cup sugar
4 peaches, cubed
1/2 honeydew, cubed

Stir first 4 ingredients in large pitcher until sugar dissolves. Add peaches and honeydew. Chill for a couple of hours. Serve in wine glasses and spoon fruit over sangria in each glass. Makes 6-7 glasses.

Where wine country meets the tea slopes

Here's an interesting Q&A — where wine blogs and tea blogs meet. The intrepid couple behind Catavino talks to Henrietta Lovell, owner of the Rare Tea Company, about how teas and wines can complement each other. A sample, this discussion of which teas to use at a wine tasting to cleanse the palate:

Oolong is the most flexible. Good oolong has such depth of flavour it can stand up beside the richest reds but is subtle enough to work with delicate white.

Generally I would suggest using whole leaf green teas with white wines. With softer red you need a good oolong and as you move into really full bodied reds the best pairing is a rich black tea like the malty caramel of Emperor’s Breakfast.

The important thing to remember is the first sip of tea is overwhelmed by the residual wine in you pallet. It is the second sip that the flavours are revealed.

A three-course meal: first flush, second flush ...

A small feature in Time Out Chicago this week (can't find it on their site to link yet) checks in with "what local chefs are doing with tea." The items:

• A chai cocktail — Darjeeling tea with honey and vanilla vodka — at the Dana Hotel.
• Green-tea dusted diver scallops, "gently" using matcha tea powder, with a pea puree at Boka!
• Chamomile ice cream at Takashi. The pastry chef steeps the flowers in cream first, then uses that to make the ice cream and serves it atop pistachio sponge cake and lemon curd.

Sounds like a complete meal to me!

(Time Out also has this ol' list of five great teahouses in Chicago.)

Smokin' out tea for dinner

Drinking tea, yes, we love it. Eating tea, that's a different story.

I went a little crazy for the holiday, experimenting on my poor spouse with a full dinner menu of dishes containing tea. Here's what we had, and how it turned out:

Lemon drop cocktails
Recipe from a book simply called Green Tea: a mixture of green tea (chilled), pepper vodka, limoncello, stirred with ice and topped with club soda. Bracing, a nice pick-me-up. Tart lemons, sweet syrup, a little astringency from the tea and, hey!, a little spice around the corner.

Earl Grey-smoked pork loin
Adapted from a recipe out of Naturally Peninsula: Tea Flavours, a nearly ridiculous collection of beyond-gourmet recipes that no home cook would ever bother with. But you can extract some of its bones for more satisfying fare. This recipe joins the pork with a morel sauce, a lentil tapanade and some fried leeks for garnish, all of which I ignored. I just wanted the tea-smoked meat: soak Earl Grey leaves for about 10 minutes and drain, mix with orange zest (and I added brown rice per some previous smoking experience), then use it to smoke a 2-lb. pork loin. I butterflied the loin before smoking. Afterward, I seared it in a skillet and finished it in a 350-degree oven for about 15 minutes. The Earl Grey smoke was quite acrid, but the flavor it imparted into the meat was delicious and quite unusual — tangy and sweet, in a vaguely mesquitey kinda way. I'll try this again, for sure.

The blackened tea leaves after smokin'.

Strawberry-avocado salsa
Instead of the other savory flavors paired in the Peninsula cookbook, I opted instead to wed the salty, smoky pork with a recipe from Cooking Light: cup o' chopped strawberries, 1/2 cup chopped avocado, some chopped red onion, 1 chopped jalapeno, cilantro, lime rind and juice, stirred together with a 1/4 teaspoon sugar. A perfect complement to the smoky meat, spooned right over each slice. I mixed mine up a little too early, though, and it started to get mushy already. Assign this to those prep cooks you married into service.

Baked potatoes with green tea garnish
Another adapted recipe from another tea book, from Steeped in Tea: Grill (45 mins.) or bake (1-1.5 hours) 2-4 baking potatoes wrapped in foil. Slice 'em in half, scoop out the cores (as if making potato skins. Mash what you scooped out with butter, sprinkle with Gyokuro green tea leaves and place the mixture back into the potato halves. Instead of actual leaves, I used some matcha powder. Careful, a little goes a long way. Made a nice green mixture for the potato skins and added a fresh, green flavor to the starchy taters.

Spring pea salad
Here's hoping fresh mint leaves qualifies for a tea menu. This recipe from Real Simple is just a mixture of fresh peas (blanched), mint leaves, a sliced shallot or two, capers, lemon zest, olive oil, salt and pepper — and crumbled goat cheese mixed in at the end. Not cool, not hot, serve at room temp. Damn tasty, but maybe too rich alongside these other dishes.

Ice cream with Sencha crumble
Another recipe carved out of a much bigger, sillier orchestration in the Peninsula book: stir together half a stick of butter, 1/4 cup sugar, 1/4 cup cake flour, some almond powder (I crushed some slivers) and a small pinch or two of green tea powder. Spread the mixture on a greased baking sheet, slip into a 325 oven for about 15 minutes. While still warm, sprinkle with another pinch of tea powder and a little powdered sugar. Let it cool down and break it into pieces. I slapped slabs of this on top of some quality vanilla and, oh mamma, it was great!

Gotcha, matcha! World Tea Expo ’09 news

News is dribbling in from the annual World Tea Expo held earlier this month in Las Vegas. (I'm a little appalled by the lack of live news from the Expo. Where were the bloggers, news sites, etc.? I'm going next year, and will fill this void!)

The big trend this year appears to have been matcha tea powder, which was showcased in its original use — whisked into a traditional Japanese tea — but much more as an ingredident in numerous bottled beverages, as well as everything from snacks to cosmetics.

The following is a pretty good video — well, it's a slide show with live audio, from Celebrity Chef Connection via YouTube — sampling some of the exhibitors and their tastes and trends at this year's expo. You'll hear at least one matcha moment here, with one exhibitor saying, rightly, "If everybody had a matcha moment, we'd have a much happier planet."



I'm always intrigued by the annual winners of the World Tea Championship. The complete list of 2009 winners is here, and I'd love to hear from any readers who've sampled these teas previously or do so in the future. I've got the list bookmarked and plan to funnel the occasional disposable income in that direction.

I can speak to one winner: Tea Gschwendner's Earl Grey (No. 69), which is the most knock-you-over fragrant Earl Grey you'll ever encounter. The taste, however, is not so bold; rather, it's simply strong, confident and colorful. I recommend. (TG is capitalizing on the company's fine showing by offering a sampler of all their teas that won or placed in the championship.) Rishi Tea absolutely dominated the championship, with 28 total awards, 11 of those being winners. (They have a sampler for sale, too!)

The winning tea cocktail sounds bracing and refreshing: the Genevrier Verte (Green Juniper) by Max Solano of Emeril's Table 10. Here's the recipe, which I love for two chief reasons: (1) he uses Hendrick's gin, which is my favorite, and (2) he uses an egg white, which is a delicious throwback to classic cocktail couture ...

Genevrier Verte
1 1/2 oz. China Mist Pure Blackberry Jasmine Iced Green Tea with Lemonade
1 1/2 oz. Hendrick’s gin
3/4 oz. Agwa Coca Leaf Liqueur
3/4 oz. vanilla/clove syrup (see here)
1/2 oz. fresh lime juice
1 egg white
Shake over ice, strain, and pour into a chilled glass.

Here's a YouTube video of the contest at the ’09 expo. The event makes imbibing look about as much fun as painting baseboards, but hey ...



(That's the World Tea Expo, but here's another tea expo on the other side of the world: last month's China West Lake International Tea Culture Expo featured opening ceremonies, a Longjing tea exhibition, even reading of tea poetry.)

Tea vodka: And the winner is ... dessert!

Two days in, and the tea infusions were ready for a full taste test. Late Sunday, the color was just coming on in each jar, and the contents were still straight vodka. Monday, the flavors were there, but the vodka was still prevalent. Tonight, the tea sprang to life in each spoon. Worried about bitterness getting the best of me (as I am in life and work every day ...), I pulled ’em, filtered ’em (two passes with a cheesecloth) and poured three cordials ...



Here are the tasting results:

The green (Japanese Kabusecha) was sprightly. Lots of tea in the nose, and a ton of distinct, fresh green tea flavor in the finish, with a persistent aftertaste. In between, in the mouth, mostly vodka and sugar. Third and fourth tastes later grew on me some more, though the astringency grew a little, too. Daniel — the poor spouse roped into the tasting (and someone who claims not to like the taste of tea one bit) — said, "I don't hate it." That, folks, is a triumph.

The black (Chinese Keemun) was a dud. No tea smell, no tea taste, no tea aftertaste. Just alcohol and sugar. The tea didn't come through at all, so I probably should have let this steep much longer. Though I hesitate, because the one thing that did scream through on the first taste was a pile of tannins. Difficult, disappointing.

The winner was the Chocolate Mint Truffle (opened Mighty Leaf bags). In the beginning, a delicious, rich chocolatey odor, with some muscle. In the mouth, a light sweetness and a fluorescence of mint around the edges. Then the chocolate settles in with the sweetness. It's a lovely marriage, and the lingering, velvety chocolate aftertatse is the honeymoon. Daniel kept drinking this one. We'll definitely add this to the regular stable.

Meanwhile, the big batch of limoncello calmly goes about its business, awaiting a mid-May unveiling, like a time-bomb set to explode with ... spring!

Tea vodka: You're soaking in it

So I like dunking things into liquids. Tea bags, mostly. Donuts on occasion, sometimes cookies. And often I have a large glass jar under the sink containing fruit rinds or berries or vanilla beans submerged into an awful lot of vodka. It's an full-infusion household here, for sure. And this week I'm going to try it with tea.

I've settled on one basic recipe for infusing most vodkas. You can really just drop the fruit right into the vodka and let it sit a few weeks, but I like this recipe the best. Gives it a heft, makes more of a liqueur.

Here's the basic recipe for what turns out less like lemon-infused vodka and more like limoncello, adapted from trial, error and Cooking Light:

1. Combine 2 cups of sugar and 1 cup water in a small saucepan. (Adjust this amount/ratio depending on your preference for sweetness.) Heat over a low flame until the sugar completely dissolves. You've got a nice simple syrup.
2. Remove the pan from the heat and stir in 5 lemon rinds, cut into strips. Let this cool completely to room temperature (otherwise, the next step evaporates the alcohol!).
3. Stir the syrup and lemon rinds, plus 1/4-1/3 cup of lemon juice into 3-4 cups (one regular bottle) of vodka. Store in a cool, dark place for three weeks, swirling or lightly shaking the container every so often.
4. Then strain and filter with cheesecloth. Stores in the fridge up to 3-4 weeks, or a year in the freezer.

The lemon rind can be replaced with a lot of different things. We did a great cranberry-lime version one year, with halved berries and lime rind. Cranberry-cinnamon was pretty tasty and autumnal. Our favorite is still good ol' vanilla; split two vanilla beans (possibly a challenge to find at the store) and drop ’em in the syrup. We also had good luck with orange rind and coffee beans, without using the sugar method; hot peppers work, too. Also, try nicking blueberries and putting those in with a cup of Chambord (and serve with a little lime). Note: I use Smirnoff's "triple-distilled" vodka for infusions. It's the right balance of quality (not great, but certainly not bottom-shelf, and the "triple-distilled" version helps) and affordability.

Today I'm starting some experiments with tea leaves. (I'm not the first — one company has actually bottled a sweet tea-vodka, targeting a Southern audience.) My concern is that, as tea lovers know, steeping tea too long increases its bitterness. So I plan to watch the samples carefully, tasting often. These could be ready in a few hours, or a few days.

I'm starting one regular large jar of the stand-by lemon version above. This uses one 1.75-liter bottle of vodka. I'm also trying small Mason jars — just like hooch! — with two spoons of these teas, with barely a quarter cup of the syrup:

• A Chinese Keemun that's one of my favorites, from Tea Gschwendner (No. 555).
• A Japanese Kabusecha, half-shade green tea from Gschwendner (No. 718). Probably a little too nice for an experiment like this, but I thought I'd want a very fresh, light taste to this.
• Opened bags of Chocolate Mint Truffle, an herbal infusion from Mighty Leaf. I received this as a gift a while back, makes for a lovely treat with a rich dessert. Contains spearmint, cacao nibs and rooibos.

Here are the jars, taking on color quickly, left to right: green, choc-mint, keemun ...


I'll report back about the spectacular failure or my rush to the patent office.