A cup of cold brew jasmine tea is the perfect beverage to cool down on a hot summer day. In this post, we’ll discuss everything from getting the right jasmine tea to utensils and brewing parameters to tips to spice up your tea.
What is Jasmine Tea?
Jasmine tea is a type of scented tea that originates from China. It is made by combining green tea leaves with the scent jasmine flowers. The process of making jasmine tea involves layering fresh jasmine flowers over the tea leaves, allowing them to absorb the flower's scent. This process is repeated multiple times until the tea flavour and jasmine aroma are in perfect balanced.
Jasmine tea is known for its sweet and fragrant taste. It is also a popular choice for the health conscious tea drinker, due to its high antioxidants level.
Jasmine tea is enjoyed worldwide and is commonly served in Chinese restaurants and sold in tea shops. Its popularity has led to different varieties, such as green jasmine tea and white jasmine tea. When brewed correctly, jasmine tea has a light yellow or green hue with a subtle floral aroma and a smooth and mellow taste. Overall, jasmine tea is an excellent choice for those looking for a delicious and healthful tea that is both fragrant and flavourful.
What is Cold Brew Tea?
Cold brewed tea has become increasingly popular in recent years, due to its smooth, sweet, and less astringent taste. It’s a type of tea that is brewed with cold water over a longer period of time compared to hot brewed tea. Typically, cold brewed tea steeps for anywhere from 4 to 10 hours in cold water. The lower temperature of the water used in the brewing process reduces the amount of caffeine and tannins released, making the drink sweeter, smoother, and less astringent.
The flavour of cold brew tea depends on the type of tea used, and the length of time it steeps. Most types of tea can be made into cold brew tea, including black, green, oolong, and herbal tea. Additionally, cold brew tea can be enjoyed plain, mixed with fruit, or infused with herbs to add depth and flavor.
How to Make Cold Brew Jasmine Tea
Now let’s discuss how you can treat yourself cold brewed Jasmine tea.
Type of Jasmine Tea
When it comes to cold brewing, you don’t need to get the most premium Jasmine tea. However, we recommend to avoid low quality jasmine tea made from crushed or broken leaves. Instead, go for whole leaf jasmine teas.
Depending on the flavour you want and whether you prefer a jasmine white tea or jasmine green tea, we recommend the following options, which you can purchase from our store:
- Jasmine Tea Deluxe (green tea): A jasmine tea with robust vegetal green tea flavour.
- Snow Jasmine (green tea): A delicate jasmine tea with a light and smooth flavour profile.
- Jasmine Silver Needle (white tea): A jasmine tea with hints of fruits and a thicker texture.
- Jasmine Dragon Pearls (green tea): A hand-rolled jasmine tea with a stronger jasmine scent and a balanced green tea taste.
You may find all four teas on our Chinese Jasmine tea page.
Generally, we recommend our Jasmine Tea Deluxe for those who want a stronger green tea taste, while Snow Jasmine offers a lighter green tea base flavour. Our Jasmine Dragon Pearls, sits right in between with when it comes to the intensity of the green tea flavour. At last, our Jasmine Silver Needle is a white tea, which offers a smoother and thicker texture with some hints of fruit.
Amount of tea and water
Obviously, the amount of tea leaves depends on the amount of tea you need to make. We recommend to use 2 grams of tea per 250ml (8.5oz) water.
Utensils
Generally any brewing vessel can be used to make cold brew jasmine tea. This can be as simple as a soft drink bottle to teaware dedicated to cold brewing. There are a few things you need to keep in mind:
- Size: make sure to get the right size depending how much tea you want to make. Also make sure it can fit in the shelves of your fridge door.
- Material: While plastic is generally save, very long brewing times can still result in very small amounts of microplastic ending up in your cup. We therefore recommend to also go for glass teaware.
- Wide opening: brewing utensils with a wider opening are generally preferred so that it’s easier put the tea inside. A wider opening also allows for easy removal of tea leaves.
- Lid: to make sure your tea doesn’t absorb other scents in your fridge, the brewing vessels should have a lid.
- Filter: there should be a filter built in the lid or inside the brewing utensil, so that no tea leaves end up in your cup when you serve the tea.
If you don’t have any suitable brewing vessel, we highly recommend our cold brew tea bottle or glass cold brew tea maker with a filter built inside the lid.
Brewing time
Generally we recommend to cold brew the tea inside a fridge for 5 hours for all whole leaf jasmine teas, except for Jasmine tea pearls (6 hours). Because the pearls are tightly rolled they release their flavour slower. Hence, the brewing time should be increased by 1 more hour. If you are using a jasmine tea that consist of broken leaves, you may reduce the brewing time by 1 hour. This is because broken leaves tend to release their flavour faster than whole tea leaves.
Tips
Sweeten your cold brew jasmine tea
Cold brew jasmine teas are naturally sweet due to the way it's prepared. However, if you want some additional sweetness you may add liquid sugar syrup or honey.
Add other ingredients
Jasmine teas are great to brew together with other ingredients for additional flavour. We highly recommend to explore jasmine teas in combination with slices of cucumber, lemon, peach, pear, and goji berries. If you've also discovered other ingredients that pair well with jasmine tea, please share them in the comment section below.
Summary: How to cold brew jasmine tea?
Now we know the parameters, let's quickly summarize how to cold brew jasmine tea:
- Pick your preferred cold brew tea maker. This can for example be any kind of teapot, bottle, or jar.
- Add 2 grams of tea per 250ml of water.
- Optional: add other ingredients that you want to brew together with the jasmine tea.
- Optional: Sweeten the tea with liquid sugar syrup or honey.
- Put the tea in the fridge and let it cold brew for 4-6 hours depending on the type of jasmine tea and your personal taste.
- Serve tea cold, optionally with ice cubes.
Conclusion
As you know now, it’s super easy to make your own batch cold brewed tea at home so that you always have a stash of tea ready when the need arises! A delicious cup of cold brewed jasmine tea, allows you to refresh, hydrate, and reenergise throughout the day.
