Iced Iced (not Mr. ) Tea, Baby

Okay, so I mashed "Ice Ice Baby" by Vanilla Ice with a former A-Team member, but it's true: I'm not making a carafe of Mr. T. I'm making (cold brew) iced tea. 

I have been using a "Crofton Cold Brew Coffee System" (available at Aldi, if you can find it. Or other versions are online at Amazon) to make cold brew / iced coffee in the past, but decided "what happens if I use tea? People make "sun tea" all the time. I wonder what this would do in the refrigerator?

Trying the last three bags in a box of Celestial Seasonings Probiotic Green Tea, I let them hang out in in the (pretty full of water) carafe in my refrigerator over night. I do have to say, I think the box has changed since I bought the green tea, as it doesn't look like the one linked. I did search for it, but they may have changed the packaging since my version is a couple years old. 

After spending close to 18  hours in a cold and dark environment (usually coffee takes a suggested 12 hours, but I did this late in day and wanted a good hang out over night), I took the bags out of the mesh holder, added some more cold water, put the pour cap on and back in the fridge it went for another hour. I wasn't ready for iced tea yet. 

I ended up trying some for lunch and it wasn't that bad. It was surprisingly good. It lasted about 2 days because both my mother and I had some, but we didn't go crazy and let that be the only thing we drank. 

The next attempt was a loose leaf peach tea from Northlandtea. Amazon doesn't seem to sell that flavor anymore, and the brand is limited on this site. The bottle I used up was admittedly 5 years old. Don't go "gross!!" at me, it was fine. I've not gotten sick from it. But we did use up what was left and actually had a friend over and she drank it with no problems! We also didn't tell her the tea has been sitting in our cabinet in an air tight container for a few years, either. HOWEVER, the tea came out great as iced in this brew system and if I had more, I'd make it again. The peach flavor was bright and not over powering. Overall, it was a smooth iced tea.

The third attempt was a failure. This is where old tea can be a bad thing. I tried using Atlantic Spice Company's vanilla loose leaf black tea. I didn't realize we still had this around because we moved with it (14 years come August) and I think it was purchased several years prior to that. So we're looking at roughly 20 years in a cabinet... yuck. I ended up throwing out the tea and whatever else we had in the cabinet that we didn't know was there. If we only had a compost pile to put it all in instead of the garbage, it would have made things easier. Lesson learned with this one: Use fresher tea. The taste was so awful, nothing salvaged it. 

Now I'm trying TEViVE brand, which is only available by third party sellers on Amazon. It also has two flavors: green and chamomile. The latter is being sold as "see options" type of thing, which more than likely means there are other things going on with it. That being said, the flavor I've got cooking, is "Mango & Strawberry". Yet again, another "best buy" of a few years ago. 

We obviously don't go through as much tea as we do coffee lately. 

Butttt... I did try a single bag the other day. I put it in a covered mason jar and did what I would do for a bigger scale. The next day, it wasn't that bad. It was fruity and smooth, so I've got a good feeling about it. Hopefully tomorrow when I take out the three bags and put the other cover on, it'll be a nice reprieve from the 100° humidity we've been having this week. ♨

As it is, it's currently 85 but feels like 96. 

It's going to get much warmer as the day goes on. Which means I should get myself moving and off to the gym. 

Stay hydrated, y'all...

Cheers

See also:

* "Ice Ice Baby" track 1 off Vanilla Ice's "To The Extreme" album. You know, the track where he ripped off Queen and David Bowie (track 11, here). 

* "Mr. T" keyword search on Amazon, leads you to needing to sift through it for the actor / wrestler.