Fast cold brew tips
Hello all :)
Anyone have any tips on speeding up cold brewing time. I’m too scattered brained to plan for 4-8hrs!
cheers
Well you could always try and break the tea down into smaller pieces, depending on which tea/blend you’re steeping of course. Generally speaking the smaller the tea, the quicker it will steep. Take green tea bags for example, they are designed to produce a strong result in just minutes but will be a little more astringent as a result.
So you could always try to blend the tea in a food mixer first and try the cold steep after a few hours and see it’s strength.
Or you can steep the tea with hot water but only do a half way steep ie if it should be steeped for 2 minutes only steep it for one, then add enough ice to cool the temperature rapidly and check back in an hour or so.
Sorry that’s the best I could think of :)
Thanks! That’s a pretty good idea. Sometimes I just add a tea bag to a generic water bottle, shake the hell out of it for a few seconds and it’s perfectly brewed and full of flavor within minutes. Loose leaf tea on the other hand takes hours! I’ll bust out my old coffee grinder and give it a try.
This is not what you asked for, but I tend to keep a rotation of two pitchers in the fridge. I just leave the leaf in there over night or for 24 hours or so – I’ve never had a green or an oolong go bitter in a cold steep.
Thanks. I do the same at home but most of my tea consumption is at work. Our fridge at work is the size of a really small filing cabinet ;/
it’s nice to know i’m not the only one who has that experience of greens and oolongs never ever going bitter coldsteeped—it seems most steepsters find green tea in particular goes bitter fast coldsteeped and i’m always like “wha? o_O” might be the types of greens involved (i don’t much like sencha so i never coldsteep it or drink it period really, just chinese greens mostly), dunno.
Yeah, I know, I also don’t get that. And I am really sensitive to bitterness.
I coldsteep a lot of flavoured sencha (I think. Most of Lupicia’s basic flavoured greens are sencha, right?) and sometimes leave it for a couple of days without a single trace of bitterness.
What kind of water do you have where you live?
really excellent artesanal well water—it’s the major thing i’ll miss when/if i ever finally move. (: when we get back from a long trip it’s the first thing i enjoy upon coming home, pouring myself a nice tall glass of sweet, clean water straight from the tap.
and yeah, i coldsteep chinese greens for days and have never had a problem. often they’re wonderfully sweet and clean tasting, with a touch of toasty nuttiness, yum.
I’m really not a fan of bitter tea at all and have never had a overly bitter cold brew tea before.
it involves a little agitation which might affect the flavor, i haven’t tried it yet, but you could try flash chilling which involves taking tea, cold water, and ice cubes and shaking them in a martini shaker until cold and straining. verdant tea has specific instructions on how to do it for most of their teas if you look at one’s how to brew directions on their website.
Thank you. Sounds like a fun way to cold brew ;)
edit. Just checked out their site. I love how they give multiple brewing options for each tea. Great!
I was thinking, should teas/tisanes used for cold brew be rinsed with hot water first? Would that also help to ‘open’ the leaves up abit?
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