Would you like to enjoy the taste of your favorite tea, but you prefer the cold drinks in the summer heat? Prepare your taste of drinks in the morning, without artificial flavors, and enjoy it well-chilled all day long.
Restaurants and bars are offering a large scale of lemonade, (the most preferred non-alcoholic drink in Budapest), but other than that, only bottled iced tea is available. If the artificial flavored iced tea is not your favorite, try some of my favorite chilled, refreshing recipes, and sip them all summer long.
Do not yourself distract from your perfect DIY iced tea, because it is time consuming. Prepare the tea of your choice the night before, cool it in the fridge during the night, if you like your iced tea in the morning. To enjoy the iced tea during the day, brew the tea in the morning, it will cool down in the fridge in 2 hours. make a stronger tea as usual, especially if you would like to serve it on ice cubes.
One of my favorite iced tea is mate, served chilled, with honey and lemon. I like to prepare it from yerba mate, and not from the tea bags, as the taste is purer and stronger this way. Mate has a strong refreshing effect, due to its’ high content of caffeine and theobromine. I scald yerba mate with one litre of hot water (not boiling water!), for about 5 minutes. Filter it into a big jar, and after it cooled down a bit, I add two table spoons of honey and one lemon juice. Keep it in the fridge, and in about two hours you can enjoy the refreshing taste. Mate tastes disctinctively different this way, than when it is served hot.
Lately I have found a recipe of this iced pineapple tea on food52, and i had to try it right away! I love recipes where you use the skin of the fruit, as most of the times we throw them away, but they contain lots of fiber and vitamin. To prepare this fruit tea you need the skin of one whole pineapple, boil it with two cinnamon and about two centimeters of peeled, sliced ginger, for about 20 minutes. Let it cool and refrigerate, covered, until it is cold. Serve it on ice cubes with slices of lemon.
Mint tea is one of the best when it is cooled. For your mint tea with berries, boil 0,5 litre of water and place 5 mint tea bags in the jar with water. Steep the bags there for 10 minutes, covered. Put one handful of berries (raspberry, blueberry, strawberry, etc. ) in another jar, and mash them with a potato masher. Pour the mint tea above the berries, add some sugar or honey if you like, and place the tea in the fridge.
All natural iced tea versions, try them , and make your own special! If you like the English version try it with milk, or if Thai is your favorite, add some condensed milk to your tea.