Brewing with Tea

This article originally appeared in the May/June 2016 issue of Zymurgy Magazine

By Mary Izett

Ask any homebrewer to come up with a three-letter word for “brewed beverage” (a common crossword clue), and I’ll bet the response is always A-L-E. But more often than not, the correct answer is T-E-A.

Tea is the second-most-widely consumed beverage in the world after water, but it’s not a drink that crosses paths with the beer world very often. Beer made with that other commonly brewed beverage, coffee, is far more readily available. But tea offers great potential to homebrewers, particularly if we extend the definition beyond the traditional, and even more so if we venture beyond barley-based drinks.

By standard definition, tea is a beverage brewed from the leaves of the Camellia sinensis shrub. The type of tea, from white to green to black, is determined by how the leaves are processed after picking. Different types of tea vary not just in aroma, flavor, and color, but also in caffeine content and levels of other compounds like tannins. But such teas merely represent the tip of the iceberg for brewers.

Walk into any modern tea store or down the tea aisle of your local grocery, and you might be amazed at the variety of flavors available. Tea leaves readily absorb and maintain aromas, and many tea blends have been specifically developed to take advantage of this. Examples range from the traditional Earl Grey, a black tea infused with the oil of bergamot citrus, to green tea flavored with peach, strawberry, pomegranate, and mango. 

Now, if we broaden the definition of tea to include any beverage made from steeping herbs, spices, or other plants, we open a whole new world for homebrewers. So-called tisanes or infusions include everything from common chamomile to its tangy sister jamaica (also known as hibiscus), herbal-floral rooibos, nutty roasted barley, and a whole crop of other plants. And then there are countless blended or flavored herbal teas. The varieties that tea companies have dreamt up are mind-blowing—and delicious.

Access the full article in the May/June 2016 Zymurgy magazine.

This article includes:

• Incorporating tea into beer
• Incorporating tea into mead
• Making sugar-based brews
• HOMEBREW RECIPE: Herbal Tea Pale Ale
• HOMEBREW RECIPE: Chai-Barley Tea Brew
• HOMEBREW RECIPE: Mango Black Tea Short Mead