Cold brewing is awesome!

If you're like me, you always have a drink of something at hand.  In my early years it was coffee or diet cola. Add twenty years, a couple of kids and an overly sedentary job driving a computer, and you can guess the results - too much weight and an unhealthy addiction to caffeine. So when my wife, who has been a tea aficionado forever, got serious about getting a tea business going, and looking at the possible ruin of my health in a few short years, I decided that it was high time to give tea a serious try.

My wife has always been really into high-quality whole-leaf teas, getting the organic types as often as possible. So, she finally got me to sample some and, WOW, was I impressed. I really like it hot, of course, but I have always been a pretty high-volume liquids kind of guy and so I turned to "iced" tea. This was great as well, but there was a real art to hot-brewing the tea and then mixing it up with ice and not have it come out all cloudy and spoiled. If you've tried this, then you know what I mean.

Then we discovered cold-brewing. It is super simple, get a cold-brew jug (we have some here), put in 4-6 teaspoons of your favorite teas into the infuser, put in good cold water (yep, I said cold - if you live in an area with hard water, you are already probably using bottled or filtered water for your tea which I highly recommend for ALL teas), and put it into the fridge for at least 4 hours. I usually make up a jug or two before going to bed and then it's ready in the morning. That's it! The tea will be somewhat different from the hot version, and some are better hot vs. cold (and vice-versa), but you really can't over-steep it since it's not cooking the tea. Also, it tends to be far less acidic and lasts for several days.

You can do this with just about any tea, but some of my favorite cold-brewed teas are:

• White Peach
• Blueberry Fields
• Paris Blend

Enjoy!