How to Make Iced Tea

Normally, when I go to coffee bars in the city and ask for iced tea, they heat up the water, add the tea bag (which is not leaf tea but mere powder), brew it and add ice cubes. If you ask the people who make iced tea for you at reputed coffee shops in New Delhi or in any other major Indian city, they would tell you the 'recipe'. But this is exactly how iced tea should not be made.

To make iced tea, you should be patient. Take 3-4 cups of water, as much as you want. Think about the kind of tea you would like to use. Most people like to use black tea. If you use black tea, then if you put one teaspoon in hot tea, then put two in iced tea. Also put few sprigs of mint into the vessel. Then put it in the fridge overnight, over twelve hours. After 12-14 hours, strain the tea, add some sugar for taste and some lemon.

You would have excellent iced tea. This is ideal for summers, real hot summers. But if you would like to drink something in light winters or in monsoons, you could still enjoy your iced tea but with a difference. In light summers or monsoons, add a half teaspoon of cinnamon powder and a half teaspoon of honey to a big mug when you pour out your iced tea.

Cinnamon and honey make for an excellent health combination also. Cinnamon makes the taste pleasing and flavors your tea in unique ways. Substitute honey for sugar. Honey gives more energy to the body and is far healthier than sugar.

If you feel like a king, then you could improvise it a bit more. Just find a small green cardamom. Crush it and put it whole, with the peel, into your mug of iced tea. You could also put a dash of saffron.

This makes for a real exotic and really tasty iced tea. Hope you enjoy it. I normally experiment with various types of tea and this is just one of them here.