My journey to the perfect Iced Tea

Mark Milford
Nov 3 · 3 min read

I am an avid hydrater of all good beverages. I like a good coffee for some days and teas on other days. Before I started drinking tea daily almost 6 years ago, the closest I got to a tea was punch made by my neighbour Jan. She was in her mid-60s and she knew how to make a good iced tea. Every year I knew we are coming to the beautiful summer in San Diago when I tasted that refreshing tea punch! I never bothered to ask Jan how she made it or whats her relationship with this refreshing drink.

Then I decided to move to LA, 7 years ago and ever since I moved there, come June time I was missing something… Nope, you guessed it wrong… I was missing the iced tea not Jan (just Jokes*). This made me wonder how come such an insignificant action or beverage can make me feel as I miss something in my life. Then my pursuit of Iced tea started. Note: I did not have Jans’ number or email to ask her for the directions and ingredients.

I ducked down to Wallmart and grabbed a black tea from the shelf and followed the first recipe I found on Google when I searched for “black tea iced tea recipe”.

Once I followed the recipe to the tee/tea, WHOLA!

This looked just like Jans’ iced tea and I was so excited… I left this in the fridge and could not wait to try it… Just a quick note, as I made my iced tea from boiled water it took a bloody long time to cool down in the fridge… Drink in 3 hours was well underestimated!

After almost a day I was all super excited and pour my iced tea into my glass, closed my eyes and took the first-ever sip of my homemade iced tea…

WOW… I was not expecting this!!! It tasted like a racoons arse! Don’t ask me why I compared a racoons arse to my iced tea… that’s all I could think of at that time…

You will be glad to know since that day I made my mission to reinvent Jans iced tea in my apartment.

I decided I need to sit down and hatch a plan… Rome was not invented in a day. So where should I start?

I started with the most basic step… TEA! I thought if I can get hold of the best ingredients like the top chefs does then that is half the problem solved. Then I when I looked into tea there is black, white, green and flavors and so on… I stuck with black, to begin with because Jans tea was dark and wanted to stick with the visual aspect.

Every week I would buy black teas from all regions in the world — Sri Lanka (Ceylon when the Pommies ruled), China, India, Japan, Napol, Kenya etc. Then I would stick with my recipe where I made every tea in the same way.

Ice tea recipe

  • 2 Ounces (25g) of black tea
  • 4 cups of water
  • 1 ripe peach
  • 4 tbl spoons of honey

1. Keep half a cup and boil the rest of the water.

2. Boil the remaining half a cup of water with honey on medium heat so it won’t burn the honey, VERY IMPORTANT!

3. Puree peach until it is smooth like a, I don’t know… like baby food!

4. Mix the boiled water, syrup and baby food sorry I mean peach puree and keep stirring slowly until it all becomes one for all and all for one!

5. Add a couple of mint leaves and maybe some diced peaches if you have some… if you don’t it is not the end of the world

6. Leave it in the fridge for a day… if you put it in the freezer maybe 3 hours

7. Serve with some ice cubes and garnish it with a couple of mint leaves.

Now I am glad to say I believe I have found the black tea that tickles ma pickle! This journey must have cost me at least $1000 a year in the hunt for that perfect black tea for my (or Jans for that matter) Iced tea.

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