Tea parties a are a little creepy, don’t you think? Halloween is a great occasion to host one, Mad Hatter style. Even without the tea party, this is the perfect cocktail to creep your guests out in a big way. We started with the basic recipe for a hibiscus tea cocktail called The Procession and upped the goulish factor a little with some hibiscus syrup and dry ice.

Ingredients (for the drink)
½ oz silver tequila
¾ oz crème de cacao (white)
½ oz ruby port
¾ oz hibiscus tea, chilled (make 1 cup more for the syrup, if using, below)
2 dashes of orange bitters

For the hibiscus syrup:
Bring 1 cup of brewed and strained hibiscus tea to a boil (2 teaspoons brewed for 5 minutes made a nice strong cup). While the tea is boiling, add a cup of sugar and stir constantly for about two minutes. Remove from heat and let cool.

Shake the cocktail ingredients together with ice and strain into a cocktail glass. Add a small chunk of dry ice (check out these instructions on handling dry ice) to the glass, and drizzle a little hibiscus “blood” along the rim. Serve immediately. The bubbling lasts for about five minutes.

Created by Daniel Hyatt, The Alembic, San Francisco. Original recipe here.

This recipe is the best thing to happen to apple cider in a long time. Yes, it’s great with cinnamon, cloves, and nutmeg, with or without whipped cream. But it’s also so, so good with our Lemon Ginger Green Tea (shot of bourbon optional). The tartness of the lemon balances the sweetness of the cider and the ginger adds just the right amount of heat.

Ingredients per serving

1 cup apple cider (we used the unspiced kind)

1 teaspoon Lemon Ginger Green Tea

1 1/2 ounces bourbon or whiskey

Directions

Heat the cider on the stove in a small pan until simmering. Remove from heat and stir in the bourbon or whiskey. Pour the mixture into a mug and steep the tea using an infuser or T-sac pouch for about a minute and a half. Strain and serve.

Variation

If straight cider is a little too sweet for you, a more traditional hot toddy might be more your thing. Steep the tea in a cup of hot water instead of cider, leaving a little room at the top of your mug. Once the tea is steeped, add the bourbon or whiskey, a shot of cider, and a tablespoon of honey (or sweeten to taste).

If you’ve followed our recipes lately, you know we’re fans of fancy looking frozen desserts that require no machine and little effort. Continuing in that tradition, we present the refreshing tea granita! If you’ve never had a granita, it is usually made with water, sugar, and flavor, sometimes fresh fruit, and has a unique texture somewhere between sorbet and shaved ice. It’s exactly what you want on a hot day and a refreshing way to enjoy the sweet, floral flavor of our Jasmine First Grade green tea.

Ingredients

¼ cup honey

Instructions

1. Steep tea for 2.5 minutes. Green tea has a tendency to become bitter with over-steeping, so be sure to strain the leaves out at this point.
2. Add honey and stir well.
3. Pour the sweetened tea into a freezer safe container. The deeper  the liquid, the longer the “granitafying” takes. We used a shallow 8×8 pan.
4. Freeze for one hour, or until ice crystals begin to form around the edges.
5. Remove and stir the crystals into the liquid. Return to the freezer for 20 minutes and repeat. Continue this process as the mixture hardens, scraping the surface with a fork as it solidifies, until fully frozen and fluffy.
6. Store in the freezer until ready to serve. If it solidifies too much, let it thaw a little in the fridge and re-fluff with a fork.

Hibiscus is a beautiful thing, but a little hard to drink straight up as a tea. Steep the dried flowers and the you get a purply-red infusion that is almost painfully tart. On the lookout for new ways to tame the flavor, we were excited to discover this recipe from Bon Appetit for a sweet, spicy, hibiscus-rose syrup. Try it in cocktails (thousand-flavor gin and tonic anyone?) and over fruit or ice cream.

What you’ll need

1/4 cup sugar

2 cups water

Seeds from 1/2 vanilla bean, split lengthwise

1 vanilla pod

3 wide strips lemon zest

3 lightly crushed green cardamom pods

1 star anise pod

5 juniper berries

1/4 cup dried rose petals

2 tablespoons dried hibiscus

1 teaspoon pink peppercorns

1 teaspoon Sichuan peppercorns

For the full instructions, check out the recipe for Fruit Salad with Thousand-Flavor Syrup.

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.