Infusing alcohol is a creative way to put a personal stamp on your favorite cocktail recipes and preserve the flavor of the season’s glorious fruits, herbs, and flowers. Enjoy your infusions all summer long or reward your shoveling in February with the taste of sunshine.

While fresh ingredients take days or even weeks to fully infuse, tea and spice infusions reach their best flavor fairly quickly and make a great place to start. Vodka’s neutral flavor makes it pretty foolproof as far adding ingredients goes. When choosing a base for your infusion, keep in mind that a higher alcohol content will increase the extraction power. High proof spirits (100 proof or higher) are diluted with water to a drinkable level once the infusion is complete. If you’re sticking to tea, which infuses easily, a lower alcohol (80 proof) content is perfectly fine, no dilution required.

What you’ll need

Vodka, 80 proof. We use Grey Goose, because we like to be fancy, it’s very drinkable infused, and because of the word Grey.

Loose leaf Earl Grey black tea. We also offer an organic version, but conducted our experiment with our standard Earl Grey. Both use 100% real oil of bergamot, extracted from the rind of bergamot oranges.

A tea strainer. We used the Hook Handle Tea Infuser, a simple metal strainer. If you’re using a finer cut of tea, you may want to strain the infusion through a coffee filter.

The Ratio

For every 1 cup of vodka, we added 1 teaspoon of loose leaf tea.

The Method

Add your desired amount of vodka and tea, in the ratio above, to a mason jar or other sealable container. Add the lid and shake to combine. Let it sit in a cool place, away from light. The flavor should be just right at 12 hours, but you can definitely drink it much earlier. After just a few hours the vodka will be tasty, but the bergamot flavor dominates. It takes a longer time for the black tea flavor to emerge, and it’s worth waiting a few more hours for. Enjoy  it cold, strained over ice, make yourself a martini, or try it with grapefruit soda (the earl greyhound).

Sometimes when you can’t decide between two great things you should just try them together. The possibility of a new great thing is worth the risk that you will ruin them both. It’s a stuffy 89 degrees today and while a tall glass of iced tea sounds perfect, so does a margarita. Tea-ritas it is.

Tea-ritas are a thing, we did not invent them. There are many variations, and we tried a few before finding our favorite. Tea with a strong flavor stands up best to tequila, which is why we used English Breakfast black in our recipe, brewed strong. The result was a little like an Arnold Palmer with a kick, the black tea flavor perfect with the lime juice and Triple Sec.

Directions

Add 1 cup of strong black iced tea (we used Organic English Breakfast) to a cocktail shaker. Pour in 1 shot of silver tequila, 1 oz triple sec, 1 shot of  fresh lime juice, and 1/4 cup simple syrup or agave syrup. Shake it over ice and strain into a glass with a salted rim, if you like that sort of thing. Garnish with lime.

Why would a person make drip coffee by hand, when there are machines for that?

If you’ve noticed the line moving more slowly at your local fancy coffee shop, pour over coffee may be to blame. The basic process involves pouring water by hand in a slow stream through grounds in a filter to produce a single cup or small batch. If this sounds like what your drip machine does, but slowly and with lots of room for human error, you are correct.

So why is this popular? Pour over is known for having a fuller, more complex flavor than automatic drip coffee, and a brighter, less heavy flavor than French press. Not necessarily better, it can yield different or a range of results from the same coffee depending on the pour. Control over the temperature and flow of the water allows for more control over the flavor profile of the end result.

If you’re interested, but doubt your ability to manage more than a push of a button in the morning, you might be wondering if manual brewers are worth the effort. We picked the Hario V60 system to demonstrate how simple the process can be. If you use an automatic brewer, you already know the basic steps by heart: place coffee in a filter, place a filter in a cone, and add water. The big difference is that you pour the water by hand. You might want to experiment a little to get your pour down pat, but once you know the drill, you can easily make this a part of your routine.

Simple Pour Over Coffee: How to Hario from Coffee Bean Direct on Vimeo.

What you’ll need:

Hario V60 Dripper

Hario V60 Range Server

Hario V60 filters

Coffee

Tablespoon

Directions:

1. Boil some water in a kettle. The Hario we’re using holds 20 oz, but you can also brew a single serving with the same equipment. After boiling, set aside.

2. Fold a V60 paper filter along the seam for a better fit and place it in the dripper.

3. Optional: lightly wet the entire filter with a little hot water. With the dripper attached, pour the hot water out once it has drained through.

4. Place ground coffee into the filter. We recommend 2 tablespoons (1 coffee scoop) of medium-fine coffee per 6 oz of water. If you want to be fancy, level the grounds and make a divot in the center. This will encourage drainage though the grounds.

5. Pour just enough water into the filter to wet all the grounds and wait 45-60 seconds, about the time it takes to find a pop-tart and stick it in the toaster.

6. Slowly pour the remaining water over the grounds. The key to doing this right is to pour very slowly in circular motion and to keep the stream of water on the coffee. Try to avoid hitting the filter or the center directly. This is easier with a thin-spouted kettle, but any kettle or teapot can work if you go slow and keep the stream as fine as you can.

7. While the last of the water is draining, give the grounds a stir with a spoon.

8. Replace the dripper with the top of the server and swirl the carafe.

9. Pour, drink, and get on with your day.

If you are a loose leaf tea fan, you probably know how to brew your favorite teas. If you don’t, we tried to make it simple on our Tattle Tea site by providing some general guidelines as well as specific brewing instructions for each tea, including amount of tea, ideal water temperature and steep time.

However, that’s per cup, hot. How does that translate to iced, especially if you’re used to throwing a bunch of teabags in a pitcher? Hot water brewing is an easy place to start. This method creates a concentrate that you can then pour over ice and can serve immediately.

Here’s our recipe for a half gallon of iced Orange Pekoe black tea.

What you’ll need:  

Large T-Sacs (we use two of the #4 size)

Two half gallon-sized containers (one should be suitable for hot liquids)

Measuring cup

Orange Pekoe loose leaf tea

1 quart water for boiling

Lots of ice

Directions

1. Fill two large T-Sacs with ½ cup of dry Orange Pekoe loose leaf black tea.

2. Boil a quart of water. We use the Ibis electric kettle.

3. Place the T-Sacs in a heat safe half gallon pitcher and add a quart of near boiling water.

4. Let it steep for 3 ½ minutes.

5. While your tea is steeping, take your second pitcher and fill it to the brim with ice.

6. When your time is up, remove the tea bags and pour your tea into the pitcher of ice slowly.

7. Once most of the ice has melted, add more ice until the pitcher is full again.

8. Pour, drink, enjoy.

Want to brew a smaller batch, or try another type of tea? The brewing instructions on our site and our packaging are for 8oz of hot tea. First, calculate how much tea you would need to brew your desired batch size normally, then double the quantity of tea. You will be pouring the hot tea over ice and adding more ice before serving, so to get the amount of hot liquid right, take your desired quantity and divide it by four. The math gets confusing to some, so just trust us on that.

One very important thing to remember: the steep time and water temperature is the same as for regular hot tea, regardless of strength desired or quantity of tea and water used. The best way to adjust the strength without getting a bitter cup is to adjust the ratio of tea to water, not the steep time.

If you want to try our whole leaf tea bags, English Breakfast tastes great iced. Use 13 bags for a half gallon, and the same steeping instructions.

Whether of not you’re heading back to school, caffeine can be a real friend on slow mornings (afternoons, or evenings).  It’s a little known fact that caffeine is lost during the roasting process and the lighter the coffee, the stronger the buzz, generally speaking. Naturally high in caffeine, we keep the roast level light on our Eyes Wide Open Blend to supercharge your study sessions, or anything else you need to stay awake for.