As someone who cold brews daily, I was of course very intrigued when I saw this line up of “cold infuse” teas from Twinings at the grocery store during my last big haul…
I have some mixed feelings on them – part of me really appreciates that they’re ready to drink in like five minutes but the other part of me feels like that’s a bit of a fundamental misunderstanding of why I like cold brewing. If I want a quick cold/chilled drink, I’ll just make an iced tea, y’know? Cold brewing is great because I can start a brew in the morning or evening and then just forget about it for hours and hours and just come back to it whenever it’s convenient for me.
The other thing with these cold infuse teas is that the reason they actually can steep so quickly is because there’s such an incredibly high amount of flavouring in the tea. There are basically two kinds of flavouring: “liquid” flavouring and “solid” flavouring, each with their own advantages. Looking closely at all four of the different flavours I bought, I can actually see the large amount of compressed flavouring within the ingredient mix. So over the course of those five minutes when you’re shaking your tea to “infuse” it what you’re actually doing is just dissolving the flavouring into the tea.
Now, I personally don’t have anything against flavoured teas at all – but at a five minute cold infusion time you’re really not allowing anything else in these blends to actually steep aside from the tiniest bit of hibiscus or apple. At that point, why not just by a flavoured water enhancer that you can just squirt into some water??
But, all of that said…
It’s a damn good strawberry flavour. Sweet and juicy without really much acidity to it, and then a refreshing “RTD Style” lemon that has its own kind of soft sweetness. It’s not really very strong compared to a standard iced tea/cold brew because nothing has really “steeped” – and the mouthfeel is thin aside from the texture of the flavouring. But yeah, for what it is I think it nails the two flavours.
