Fresh Fruits And Herbs In Iced Tea Cocktails, From Garden To Glass
Cocktails prepared with iced tea as the base mixer are inviting drinks during summer because of their refreshing taste and rejuvenating quality. Over time, mixologists have been dabbling with myriad ingredients that can be infused into iced tea along with spirits like rum, vodka, bourbon and gin to elevate the complexity of this boozy blend.
And many of these ingredients are actually fresh herbs and tangy fruits that add a fresh touch to a drink traditionally savoured during summer weather to beat the sweltering heat.
When you nurture a small garden at home in your backyard, plant some herbs and citrus fruits like oranges and lemons which will grow up to give you bountiful fresh produce that can be used as a garnish or as an infusion in your cocktails. Such fresh herbs can be plucked from the shrubs, muddled and directly added into iced tea drinks for extracting their vibrant flavour notes. And if you fancy yourself a mixologist, you can employ several methods to incorporate these elements from your home garden into your cocktail glass.
Here are some of the ways in which fresh herbs and zesty fruits can be used to pack your boozy iced teas with complex flavours:
Chopped Fruits
An easy and handy hack to use fresh fruits from your garden in iced tea cocktails is to chop them up and add them to the drink as garnishes. This would bring a zesty, crunchy and sweet quality into an otherwise intense drink.
The chopped fruits could be everything from apples, oranges and limes to chikoos or mangoes that grow abundantly in your garden. Pulpy, tangy fruits will also bring a slight sangria-like finish into the drink that would add another textural element to the cocktail.
Muddled Herbs
You can easily grow herbs like mint, basil, thyme and rosemary in your back garden. Tend to these plants with care so they will produce an abundance of greens which can be plucked fresh to be added as garnishes and juicy flavour infusions into tea drinks.
You can infuse basil into a concoction of black tea and bourbon so it complements their intense notes and add crushed mint into a classic iced tea packed with rum so it can introduce a spicy and sharp layer into the chilled beverage.
Herbal Infusions
When you are enthusiastic about preparing your own mixers, you can actually craft herbal infusions using homegrown mint or thyme that can be employed in lieu of chilled water to prepare iced tea. Make this infusion at home by simmering these herbs in boiling water so their fragrance and flavours steeps well. Then strain, bottle and chill this mix and top your brewed tea with the aromatic herbal infusion and a generous 45 ml pour of Captain Morgan Dark Rum to prepare a sweet yet savoury herbal and boozy tea.
Fruit Flavoured Sugars
Sometimes, adding sugar into your tea can be turned into a fruity affair by preparing flavoured sugars using the fruits that bloom in your back garden. Extract pulp from oranges and juice from limes and mix them in sugar to craft a delicious fruity sweetener that can be used to elevate the flavours of the iced tea mix. With this you can infuse fruity flavours into drinks that spread uniformly through the mix as the sugar dissolves in the tea.
Fruit Purees
When brewing unsweetened black tea, you can do away with sugar to instead introduce sweetness into your iced tea cocktail using the natural sweetness of ripe fruits. This can be done by preparing purees out of peaches, berries and mangoes mixed in a little bit of water and strained to produce a clear liquid. Add this to your iced tea coupled with a 45 ml pour of Don Julio Blanco tequila to prepare a boozy cocktail embodying a fruity zest.
