Not my horrible pun, it's The Spirit's, but I loved it enough I had to share.
If you're rolling your eyes, think of this as a natural development of the Hot Toddy-- the guy they interviewed for this mailing did! (Yes, I'm on their email list. I haven't had a drink in months, but it's so fun to read the recipes, and history and get ideas! I'm still meaning to do a vodka/green tea infusion one of these days, might get my sister in law off of those hideous jaegerbombs.)
Quote:
As with any cocktail, balancing ingredients in a tea drink matters. Cason advises knowing your teas and spirits to enhance pairings. For instance, the bergamot oil in a good Earl Grey tea helps it play well with other citrus, such as Plymouth Gin (made with lemon peel), to create a winning cocktail. (He especially enjoys the combination in his Earl Grey MarTEAni.) Similarly, a spicy rum would complement a chai tea. As a general rule, the stronger the tea, the bolder the spirit it can balance.
Cason works with loose tea, adding it to simple syrups and bottles of spirits, and then straining it out. You can leave tea in simple syrups for a day or so to maximize flavor, but leaving tea in a spirit for more than 30-45 minutes releases tea’s tannins and bitter flavors, ruining the alcohol. Also, you don’t need expensive liquors for infusions, since the tea will overshadow delicate flavors.
I love the idea of knowing I'll have a party the next day, so I start making the simple syrup, put tea bags into bottles and pour the nearly boiling syrup over them to wait for the next day. Probably green tea, Earl Grey, Lemon Zinger, Red Crush ("berry" flavored-- tastes like raspberry to me) and a double-strong standard Lipton black tea; I can see the "hard ice tea" being incredibly popular, and the very notion of Earl Grey and Gin sounds delightful to me.
I had a hot toddy not too long ago, and I thought it was perfectly vile. I would like to find other hot spirited beverages - so perhaps something here could work... Earl Grey with gin, you say? Definitely a possibility...
ReplyDeleteBefore I started reading this ezine, I didn't know that a "hot toddy" was a specific drink-- it's been a generic term for "hot, spiked beverage" all my life!
ReplyDeleteOooh, maybe some strong Earl Grey tea with a splash of whiskey....
I'm not really terribly creative about these things, but I'll drink anything reasonable if somebody else will set 'em up. :) That said, milky chai with Jameson is pretty darned good, so I imagine that a lot of these combos are nice also. And the great cold weather drink of Victorian Irish in the US used to be plain old hot water, lemon, and whiskey. Tea is just flavored hot water.
ReplyDeleteThe hot rum toddies I've had were good. Too good. One of those cases where two is one too many, but it's very difficult to drink just one. :)
Victorian Irish, heck, add some honey and that's my dad's Scottish cough cure!
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