 Hey T heads, this is Don from Mei Leaf. In this video, three ways to make iced tea. In this video, I'm going to be sharing with you three different methods for making ice cold tea and we're going to be trying to choose a winner. This video is going to go under the tea recipes playlist. If any point in time you enjoy this video, then please give it the thumbs up, the more thumbs in the air, the more tea videos you're going to come your way. And if you haven't subscribed to our YouTube channel yet, then go click that button. It is a sunny Sunday in London. Summer has finally arrived and it is hot and whenever the weather heats up, we all crave a nice cold drink. Now you can drink hot tea on a sunny day. In fact, hot drinks in hot weather has been shown to help cool you down just as much. If not more than drinking cool drinks, but hey, there is nothing better on a hot day than sitting back with an ice cold drink. And I'm always disappointed whenever you go to barbecues or you visit friends that there isn't more iced tea about everyone's drinking juices or drinking alcoholic beverages, but where is the iced tea? And those bottled iced teas that you can buy in the shops, they tend to have a lot of artificial flavors or lots of sugar in and they don't use high quality tea. You are all tea heads. We want to really maximize the flavor, texture and aroma of the tea when we are making iced tea. So let's go through the different methods. So first of all, I'm working here with a green tea. Let me see, see if you can see this. You know what? I'll put it in a glass so you can see the color. This is a macchinojara shizuoka censure. This is fuke mushi, which means it's deep steamed. And that's going to give the iced tea a beautiful color, a really nice green color. This is a tea that we are planning to get into stock at Mayleaf. So keep your eye open for that. And the reason why I've picked this tea is because green tea is the most sensitive. It's the most sensitive to reacting with time. It's also a great tea for ice because it has so many of those bright, light aromas. It's got so much of those fresh aromas that iced tea just really suits well with it. But you can do this with all teas. This tea is probably the most sensitive. And so the attributes that we can assign to each different method of brewing iced tea, the floors and the successes will be amplified with the green tea. So that's why I've picked the green tea. All right, let's go through the method. Method number one is probably the most simple method and the method that most people use, which is simply that you brew the tea as you would normally brew it. So in this case, I brewed two teaspoons in about 500 ml of water. And the water is at about 75 or 80 degrees, which is about 170, 175 Fahrenheit. And brewed it for about a minute and a half, two minutes until I was happy with the strength. And then I just strained it off into this jug and let it go to room temperature and then put it in the fridge and let it cool. So this was done overnight, you cooled overnight and we did this yesterday. And you can take a look at the color of this. Now the color of this is slightly more yellow and slightly more cloudy than the fresh brewed tea. So that's method number one and probably the most common method. Method number two is this one. So for this one, this is cold brewed tea. So I've done a video on cold brewed tea before. I'll put a link in the description below if you're interested to find out more about that. But this is cold brewed, which basically means we've taken the same amount of leaf in the same amount of water, but we've just poured cold water over the leaf and put it in the fridge. So this has taken its time to extract over about, I would say about 14 hours or so. It's been sitting in the fridge extracting and the beautiful thing about cold brewed is because it's in cold water, it doesn't extract too much of the tannins, so you don't get too much of the bitter notes of tea. So even though the leaf, as you can see, is sitting at the bottom of this container, it hopefully has not gone bitter, so we're going to try that one. There you go. So that's a cold brewed method. Now you can take the leaves and brew them with hot water and then once you've finished a session, take those leaves that still have a few more infusions to go, put them in cold water and cold brew that way, but I wanted to make these exactly the same so we have a fair comparison. Okay, so these are the first two methods and I had to do these in advance for obvious reasons. Now let's brew up the third method and the third method is flash chilled and this is what we do at the male leaf tea house. So if you ever visit us in London in Camden and you order an iced tea from us, then we will flash brew it, which means we're going to brew it fresh and then shake it over ice. So I'm going to put these two teaspoons of the macchino harder fukemushi censure in there. I'm going to rinse this out. The wonderful thing about working in the garden, if you can just pour every anywhere you want and I'm going to pour the, I'm going to pour, so we're going to try to match the same amount of liquid, which is not going to be too easy, but we'll try. So normally I'd be pouring to kind of where the spout joins the the tea pot about here. That's something in the region of about 450 ml, something like that, but because we're going to be shaking this over ice, we want to do less than that. So I'm going to do about half. So here we go, we're going to pour it in, I would say, to about here. That's about half and we're going to leave it again. I think that with flash chilled teas, you want to leave it just a little bit longer, maybe about two minutes so that you extract the most amount of flavour. Now what we're going to be doing after that is we're going to be straining this tea over ice. You can do this, you don't need a shaker, you can do this in a jug like this and just put some ice in and stir it, it's not necessary, shaking it is a more flashy way to do it, but it also means that you get these kind of little ice crystals forming which gives it a slightly more refreshing feel to it. So these are the teas, let's give a, while this is brewing, let's have a little sniff of the dry leaf. Oh, this is a beautiful shinsha, fresh picked. So I'm getting notes of toasted rice, fresh cut grass, obviously, that very, very green. Not too many sea notes, not too many marine air notes, more like stream, like forest stream, like that very fresh forest stream air. So you're getting a bit of the pine, you're getting a bit of the grass, you're getting the rocks, you're getting that stream, but there is definite warmth to it. I would put it as toasted rice, potentially kind of yellow bamboo, those kinds of notes. Okay, right, so now that we have our tea brood, I think that was about two minutes, something like that, you guys are on the stopwatch, not me. So now the idea is to pour this through a strainer, you can pour direct and have the leaves in here and shake it like that and then strain afterwards, completely up to you, no problem, you can do that. At this point, you could also add flavorings, like maybe some herbs, maybe some mint, maybe you'd throw some ginger in, so you shake it all up together, that's also possible to do as well. We'll talk a little bit about that in a second. All right, so I think that that's good. So we're going to pour this out through a filter. You have to filter these sensors, especially the Fouca Moushi, because the Fouca Moushi is deep steamed, it means that the leaf is really broken up quite a lot, so you need to put it through a nice fine filter like this, so we're just going to make sure that that has gone through. Okay, you can use this again, you could throw this in cold brew and it would brew up really, really nicely, I'm just going to put that to the side. Okay, so now I want to try and judge how much ice to put in, to try and match it. It's always a surprising quantity. I'm going to put in, I'm going to put in probably about nine cubes of ice. Put this on, this is where I make a mess. Shake it up, and you can feel it just going cold immediately. Okay, so here we go. Right, so now we're going to pour this iced tea into this glass, and I think I've done a pretty good job of matching the amounts. So let's put them all together, and you can see. Method one, method two, and method three. So first of all, let's talk about colour. Obviously, this colour has oxidised. You can see that it's gone much more yellow, it's oxidised. So the reason for that is because it was brewed with hot water, it extracted everything out, but then it was left for too long, it was left in the fridge, that's reacting with the oxygen in just this little chamber, it's reacting with it and it's starting to oxidise. That means it's going to affect not just only the colour, but it should also affect the flavour. Whereas these two are beautiful, beautiful colours, right? Nice light green. You ask me which my favourite is, it would be this one here, because this is a deeper green, it's still very vibrant, still very fresh, but it's a deeper green, and looks really, really, really enticing, I can't wait to taste that. All right, so those are the looks, but let's do a taste test. These are fresh out of the fridge, so they are very, very cold as well. Now you can garnish, you can do whatever you want, you could add yourself a little stem of lemongrass, some ginger, a little slice of ginger, or some mint leaves. As I said before, you could also flavour these at any point, so if you wanted to add some fruit nectar, you wanted to add some cordial, you could, that's completely up to you, but I wanted to taste what they're like, just pure. All right, so here we go, method one, method two, and finally the beautifully frothy method three, and this is where I pour tea all over my phone. Okay, and since this has ice in it, there's nothing sadder than a cold drink without some clinking sound going on, so you've got to, you've got to throw a nice cube in, keep it cold, that way you get the nice clinky effect. Okay, so visually clearly this is the winner, but let's go with texture first, so I'm not going to concentrate on taste, just concentrate on texture and finish. Good texture, quite, I would say medium, but the finish is definitely dry, I can feel the oxidation that's happened, I can feel this drying sensation throughout my whole mouth. Oh, a world of difference, soft, smooth, the cold brewing makes it thicker, just because the leaf has been in there, it's developed to that body really, really over the 12, 14 hours, the body is really thick, soft, no dryness, and I already am getting a lot more taste out of it, but we'll talk about that later, finally the flash chilled. I would say the texture is somewhere in between for this one, so because you've hot brewed, because we've used hot water to brew, you are pulling out those tangents a bit more, and so I'm getting the texture, but it's a much more light biting texture, it's a dryness which comes, it's more of a mineral dryness, it's actually quite an enjoyable dryness, and it's more in the front of the tongue rather than catching on the throat. Try one more time. Yeah, this is a kind of cloying catching sensation, whereas this is like a nice mineral chalky kind of dryness that's actually quite quenching. Right, let's move on to taste, and I can already tell you that this one is not, is not making me very happy at all. Taste old, it tastes, it tastes okay, so I'm getting the cut grass, I'm getting the bamboo, green bamboo, but it just tastes old, I mean I can't really put it any better way, it tastes like it's been sitting, it tastes slightly stagnant, it just doesn't have the same bit vibrancy as you would want from this tea, and this is why green tea is a great one to test it on, because you'll really notice it with the green tea. Hey, it's not unpleasant, it's a bit bitter, it's kind of got more kind of dry grass notes, a little bit of hay, and it's just diled down in terms of the brightness, it's like you've taken an EQ on a nice bit of music and you've taken the treble off, it's just very, very dull tasting, okay, cold brew, wow, so much more, okay, so we've talked about texture, it's a lot thicker, but the taste is, I'm getting green bamboo, I'm getting mineral, I'm starting to pick up some of the floral notes, very kind of light dusting of kind of high note, higher synth kind of aroma, those kind of sweet meadow flowers, but very, very light, it's not, it's not a floral tea by any stretch of the imagination, but it's there, the umami is coming through as well, I'm getting that slight savoury note to it, which is great with Japanese green teas, bright, very bright, but balanced as well, so I'm getting the umami, I'm getting the toasted rice notes, but those slight floral notes, the cut grass, it's not really cut grass, it's more like uncut grass, it's more like when you're sitting in a meadow and you're kind of, you know, having a picnic and you're lying down, you're getting that kind of just nice fresh grass, but quite early morning, dui kind of grass taste, delicious, I'd be so happy if I went to a barbecue this summer and somebody was serving this, that would make my day, okay, flash chilled, beautiful colour, beautiful, darker, more rich, powerhouse, full flavoured, as I said, it's got more of the dryness, it's got some of those tannins coming out, but I really like that, if you don't like that, then brew with cooler water and you'll, you'll control that, but the flavour, now I'm getting a lot more of the cut grass, I'm getting a lot more complexity, there's something, yeah, I don't know if you know these umeboshi, these pickled, Japanese pickles, kind of sweet, fragrant Japanese pickles that they put on the side of, of dishes like rice dishes or sushi when they are serving in Japanese restaurants, they're these pickles and umeboshi is one of my favourite ones, it's kind of got a very kind of floral rosy flavour, gorgeous, this one has the most amount of complexity, so selecting, choosing a winner, clearly this is out, so this is what I would advise people to stay away from, if you're going to do cold, if you're going to make iced tea, then please don't make this method, because it's not going to do justice to the tea that you're using, these two however are both amazing, they are both delicious, the differences I would say the pros of this one is texture, the texture of this is so rich, thick and soft, it's a very smooth soft drink and you get a lot of flavour, more of the bright notes, more of the high notes, less of the tannic notes, less of the bitterness, less of that kind of um satisfying quench, then this one, this one has the most amount of flavour, it's the most complex, and it has that bitterness which leads to sweetness and I really love that, but if you're looking for something that's very soft and elegant, then this is probably the one to choose, up to you guys, feel free to experiment, let me know the outcomes of your experiments in the comments section below, that's it, teaheads, if you made it to the end of this video then please give the video the thumbs up, check out our YouTube playlist and let us know if there are any videos that you would like us to make, if you're ever in London, then come and visit us at the Mayleaf teahouse in Camden to say hi and taste our wares, if you have any questions or comments then please fire them over, other than that, I'm Don May on A Beautiful Somersday in London, thank you for being a part of the revelation of true tea, stay away from those tea bags, keep drinking the good stuff and spread the word because nobody deserves bad tea, bye.