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Author:
Franco Salzillo
Cold brew tea is as delicious as cold brew coffee. If you’re not familiarized with the term, let’s start from the beginning. Both coffee and tea need boiling water to leach out all their color and flavors. Well, you can achieve a similar result, perhaps better by steeping coffee or tea in cold water. The only difference is that you need patience.
Here’s my recipe for the famously refreshing and summer-favorite, the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf lightened mango cold brew tea, and it all starts with a pitcher of cold brew tea, achieved by steeping a whole bunch of tea bags in water for at least 12 hours in the fridge.
What you get is an intensely flavored tea that’s gorgeous on its own. Just sweeten it and enjoy. CB&TL, though, adds mango puree to the tea for their famous tropical version, and it works nicely.
There are many types of tea out there, so which one to use? Well, since we’re making a copycat version of the Californian coffee chain, we’ll follow their lead and use Scottish Breakfast tea, a heartwarming black tea with a very well-defined bitterness and pleasant aromatics — it works really well with the mango puree.
Talking about substitutions, once you master the cold brew tea, you can flavor it with anything, from blackberries and strawberries to other tropical fruit like lychee or peaches. The sky’s the limit!
In my experience, the fruit puree works both as a flavoring and a sweetener, but depending on your pitcher size, you might want to add a bit more sugar. Here you can use anything, including stevia and monk fruit if you want a low-carb tea.
Allow me to let you in on a little secret. If you don’t have time to cold brew your tea, heat a small pot of water and brew your tea there. Then just mix it with more water to complete the pitcher; it’s not the same thing, but it’s fantastic for where you’re in a rush, and people won’t tell the difference, trust me on that one.
In a pitcher filled with water, steep the tea bags to the desired strength, stirring occasionally.
Store the pitcher in the fridge overnight.
Remove the tea bags and add the mango puree. Check the sweetness and adjust with sugar; keep the pitcher in the fridge.
When ready to serve, fill your glasses with ice, stir the tea one last time and pour.
