Green Tea Vodka

For those who like their green tea to pack a little wallop, Napa Valley-based Charbay Winery and Distillery offers Charbay Green Tea Vodka.

The vodka, which was several years in the making, uses extractions of four tea varieties from China's Anhwei province. It joins Blood Orange, Ruby Red Grapefruit, Meyer Lemon, Red Raspberry and Pomegranate, a line of flavored vodkas the family-owned winery and micro-distillery began making in 1998.

The company notes that this is the first green tea vodka produced in the United States (which implies that perhaps there are others being made offshore). One of their recommendations for using the product is a China Grill Green Tea Martini. It mixes 1.5 oz Charbay Green Tea, 1.5 oz freshly brewed green tea, 1.5 oz unfiltered cloudy sake and a splash of simple syrup.

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Tea Wine

I've written enough times in these pages about the intersection between alcohol and tea that the site has a category devoted to this topic. Check out some of the other pieces here.

Calcutta's Telegraph recently reported about an effort taking place at India's Tocklai Experimental Station to make wine from tea. It's one of many initiatives that the station is working on to raise the profile and marketability of tea.

The article is a bit sparse on details, but you can check it out here.

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Tea Review 83 - Mateveza Yerba Mate Ale

Mateveza Yerba Mate Ale
Mateveza LLC

I've mentioned Mateveza a few times now. Recently the good people who make it were kind enough to send me a bottle.

Mateveza is made with yerba mate. If you scout around here at the site you'll find that I've written about it a good bit. I don't drink beer much these days but I discovered yerba mate a few years back and developed quite a taste for it.

Along with the sample of Mateveza, I also received a small amount of the yerba mate used to make it. It was good, but I suspect that I'm not quite enough of a connoisseur to make much of a distinction between different yerba mate varieties.

As for Mateveza, I have to admit that I wasn't sure what to expect. But I was pleasantly surprised. What I found most interesting about the product was that there were two very distinct flavors happening at the same time - the sweetness of the ale and the bitterness of the yerba mate.

Which worked quite well, in my opinion. The two tastes offset each other nicely. If you're not a fan of yerba mate - and it can be an acquired taste - you may not agree. But it's certainly worth a try.

Recommended.

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tea, green tea, food, food and drink, yerba mate, beer, ale

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Yerba Mate Ale & T Bars

Can't decide whether to have yerba mate or beer? You're in luck. As we mentioned before, Mateveza Yerba Maté Ale is a new product that combines both. The product and its creator were profiled recently at SFist.

If we're to believe the gang at Food Processing magazine, T Bar Green Tea Nutrition Bars are nothing to write home about. The vegan-friendly bars are available in three flavors — Green Tea, Natural Rice and Tropical Fruit - but the reviewers tasked with evaluating them were quite unimpressed.

How unimpressed? How about "I once ate a paperback novel that tasted like this.” Now, that's not very nice, is it?

Image: Tzu The

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Yerba Mate Beer & More

It seems that yerba mate is all the rage these days. So it was probably only a matter of time before someone came up with yerba mate beer. That someone would be Butte Creek Brewing Company, who, in concert with Mateveza USA, have devised a brew called Mateveza Yerba Mate Ale.

As the manufacturer puts it, Mateveza Yerba Mate Ale is "an organic, naturally caffeinated pale ale brewed with yerba mate, the ancient tea from South America."

Butte Creek Brewing Company is based in Chico, California. Mateveza Yerba Mate Ale will be available initially on draft and in 22-ounce bottles throughout California and Oregon. Retailers will include Whole Foods, Wild Oats, and more.

The Web site is here, though it looks kind of sparse at the moment.

In other yerba mate news, be sure to check out the new Happy Gaucho site. It's a production of the gang over at Natural Latitudes, who got me started on "proper" yerba mate consumption.

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Book Review - What to Drink With What You Eat

If you're looking for the lowdown on food and beverage pairings, you'd probably do well to check out What to Drink with What You Eat, by Andrew Dornenburg and Karen Page. It's billed as "The Definitive Guide to Pairing Food with Wine, Beer, Spirits, Coffee, Tea - Even Water - Based on Expert Advice from America's Best Sommeliers."

If you're going to buy the book solely for the advice on pairing food and tea, I'd caution you to look at a copy first. While it contains some excellent advice about tea pairings, as well as the other beverages mentioned, wine is really the primary focus of the book.

To read my full review of What to Drink With What You Eat, at Epicurean.com, click here.

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Tea Review 75 - Voyant Chai Cream

Voyant Chai Cream Liqueur

If you like the taste of chai tea but you find yourself longing for something with a little more muscle, Voyant Chai Cream Liqueur might be just what the doctor ordered.

Voyant, which bills itself as "the original chai cream liqueur," is a mix of "Aged Virgin Island Rum, Fresh Dutch Cream, Black Tea from India, Premium Spirits from Holland and a Distinctive Blend of Spices."

Since I first mentioned this product a while back, I've had a chance to sample it. I should say that I'm not much of a tippler these days and I've always been impervious to the charms of chai. With that in mind, I've got to admit that I found Voyant Chai Cream surprisingly tasty.

I didn't catch too much of the tea flavor, but that's not surprising, given the nature of the other ingredients. The creaminess was appealing and the chai component didn't overpower the other elements, which was a big plus for me.

Voyant Chai Cream also gets points for the eye-catching design of its bottle. I'm not much for knick-knacks, but I was tempted to keep one on hand just for decoration.

More about Voyant Chai Cream at their Web site. For cocktail and food recipes that use the product, visit the Voyant Creations section.

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Adagio Teas - Free Teapot Offer

Tea With A Kick & More

Here are a few miscellaneous items to get your Monday underway.

The New York Times writes about tea again - that's three substantial articles in about the last week. Tea With a Little Kick appeared Friday. It's a look at that place where tea and alcohol meet. I've written a few brief posts on this very same topic. Here's the most recent one.

Here's an article in the British press about a chain of tea shops set to open over in that part of the world. Ringtons is expected to open as many as 100 tea and coffee shops in the UK, apparently within the next ten years.

Speaking of tea and coffee shops, there's one called Starbucks - you may have heard of them. Perhaps you've also heard that they're raising the prices of their beverages. AP reports that "prices of its lattes, cappuccinos, drip coffee and other drinks" will go up by about a nickel.

Last up is a site I ran across the other day for Bouteaque, who bill themselves as a merchant of "tea-inspired bath & body products."

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Adagio Teas - Free Teapot Offer

Green Tea Beer

For some fanciers of liquid refreshment, it would be the best of both worlds - beer and green tea. It's a topic that we've written about before, though I don't know if iKi Bier - from the Netherlands - is made with green tea or black and I don't know how readily available it is in this part of the world.

Something that should be more readily available hereabouts is BluCreek Brewing's Zen IPA beer, which takes an India Pale Ale and flavors it with green tea. It debuts some time in August, according to a recent piece at Themilwaukeechannel.com.

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Vodka & Yerba Mate

We've written about several combinations of tea and vodka thus far. Here's a link to one of those pieces.

Now here comes Zygo Vodka, which combines vodka with yerba mate, among other things, to make a spirit that's supposed to energize you at the same time it's making you tipsy. Now what do you make of that?

Anyway, here's a piece on Zygo from the Boston Globe and here's the link to the company's flashy Web site with mucho bells and whistles. Which is all well and good unless you're actually trying to find some info.

Image: Zygo

tea, green tea, food, food and drink, vodka, energy drinks, yerba mate

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Vodka Recipes & Rooibos Recipes

Some time back I wrote about a green tea-flavored vodka from Charbay Winery and Distillery. While nosing around at their Web site recently, I ran across a page that list recipes for three cocktails made using this particular spirit. There's the Angèle Green Tea Cooler, the Charbay Green Teani and the Mochi Cocktail.

Over at Simpson & Vail's Web site, they have an iced tea recipe that uses vodka and Rooibos, or redbush, an herbal "tea" from South Africa. Also at their Rooibos recipes page are various recipes for drinks, cocktails, desserts, soups and main dishes. Rooibos Fudge, anyone?

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Tea & Gin

Thus far we've reported on several distillers who make vodka flavored with various types of tea. Our most recent article on the topic is located here.

If you were waiting for gin to take its turn in the spotlight, then you shouldn't have to wait much longer. Business Week recently reported that House Spirits, an Oregon-based maker of the hard stuff, will soon feature a gin that uses Darjeeling tea, among other things, as an ingredient.

GBT Winter Gin is expected to roll out some time in autumn. It's a blend of Darjeeling tea, toasted carob, nutmeg, fenugreek, cranberries, and coriander and is expected to sell for somewhere between $35 and $40 per bottle.

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Tea With A Kick

Mixing tea with something a little stronger is not a novel concept. I previously wrote about such blends here and here. Among the suspects mentioned were a pair of tea-flavored vodkas, a green tea liqueur, a "green hard tea" and tea-flavored beer.

Another one to add to your list is Voyant Chai Cream. I haven't tasted this one, but the manufacturer describes it as a blend of "Aged Virgin Island Rum, Fresh Dutch Cream, Black Tea from India, Premium Spirits from Holland and a Distinctive Blend of Spices from Asia."

While we're on the subject, here's a list of drinks over at Webtender that are made with tea. You can also download a collection of drink recipes at the Voyant site. Enjoy, and remember to drink your tea responsibly.

tea, food, food and drink, chai, vodka, liqueur, beer

Tea Or Wine?

Can't decide whether you're up for a cup of tea or a glass of wine? Your problems may be solved. As this brief article notes, the Sri Lanka Tea Research Institute has come up with a beverage that combines the best of both worlds.

If you like your tea with a kick, or your kick with a little tea, for that matter, be sure to check out my previous entries on the subject of tea and alcoholic beverages here, here and here.

Thoroughly Modern Spirits

Tea-flavored vodka is not exactly new to these pages. Charbay Winery and Distillery makes one that's flavored with green tea, which I first mentioned here. I also wrote about it here, in a piece that mentioned a few other tea-flavored alcoholic beverages.

To this list we can now add a tea-flavored vodka from Modern Spirits, who make a line of eight flavored sipping vodkas. The tea flavor is made using "three remarkable tea blends from Paris." Among the other flavors are Chocolate Orange, Celery Peppercorn and Black Truffle.

Green Tea in the House of Spirits

Some time ago I posted a brief piece about Charbay Green Tea Vodka, which is manufactured by the Napa Valley-based Domaine Charbay Winery and Distillery. That got me to thinking that there surely must be other alcoholic beverages out there that are made using tea.

And what do you know? There are other tea-based spirits and beers on the market. If you head over to the BevMo Web site you can pick up some Bison Jasmine Green Hard Tea, which contains jasmine tea, ginseng, ginkgo biloba, and guarana. Also at BevMo - and probably some other specialty beverage sites - is Zen Green Tea liqueur, which gets a bonus point for it's aesthetically pleasing green bottle.

If you like a little tea with your beer, then try some iKi Bier, which is apparently a product of the Netherlands. And if you'd like the essence of the hard stuff, but still want to respect yourself in the morning, get thee to Culinary Teas and try out their Liquor Tea Sampler. This one consists of five samplers of black tea with liquor flavorings and is guaranteed not to cause your inner teetotaler any undue distress.