Tea is always just proper. It’s the cherries, berries, and blossoms that don’t last as much. So while the summer is at its twilight, let’s have a perfect green tea cuppa à la potpourri that medleys a bit of all that’s good about the season – fruit, flowers, warm colours, and yes, tea!
This recipe calls for Birchall Green Tea & Peach prisms/bags owing to its cleansing natural infusions that impart fruity, floral undertones that suggest essentially one thing – summer. The empyrean trio of real fruit pieces, marigold, and green tea does that job well enough to have us fix this sunny drink from the pure gold that is green tea.
Upon the first sip, you get the floral notes of marigold, then a peachy undertone, and finally light and subtle grassy aftertaste from the green tea. Then the summery tanginess of fruit takes its turn to love your palate. You’ll be then left with a fruity sweet savour of surprise at the end of the line.
You’ll need:
- 1 Birchall Green Tea & Peach prism bag
- 60 ml (2 imp fl oz) of peach puree/apricot nectar
- 1 teaspoonful of honey / simple syrup/ treacle
- 1 maraschino cherry (optional, but highly recommended)
- 1 teaspoon of syrup from maraschino cherry tin/grenadine syrup (optional, but highly recommended)
- 1 sprig of thyme/ peach slices (optional, for garnishing)
- blue food colour / half a teaspoon of blue curaçao syrup (completely optional)
Let us get started:
- Combine the sweetener and peach puree/apricot nectar to make a thick slush. Cool the mixture well before layering.
- Steep the green tea in 150 ml water at 80℃ for 2-3 minutes (or until golden) and let cool after removing the leaves.
To ‘fix’ your cuppa:
- Place the cherry at the bottom of the glass.
- Add the maraschino cherry syrup, grenadine syrup, or a combination of both halfway up the cherry. You want the lovely cherry showing.
- Gently pour in the fruit and sweetener mixture over the back of a spoon. Fill the glass only halfway through. Chill the assembly if you’d like.
- Likewise, float your tea by slowly pouring it over the back of a spoon to fill the glass.
- Garnish with a sprig of thyme.
- Serve right away or enjoy at your leisure – the drink is a brilliant shade of golden orange even after you’ve stirred it with the thyme sprig.
Pro Tips:
- Chill the cherry and glass. You have better chances of retaining the drink layers if the solid elements keep the liquids cool. No more bleeding layers!
- Remove the cherry stem if you think it might bother the layers of your drink – the sun doesn’t have a stem, after all.
- You may use any red berry of the season, like strawberry, raspberry, loganberry, or redcurrant, instead of the maraschino red cherry; or even a fresh cherry. Just don’t skip the grenadine – it’s not just red and sweet, it is the fruit that makes every sip of this drink better.
- Use a glass that gradually tapers down. This way cherry-sun will be visible, and the 1:2 ratio of orange slush to golden tea will make an equal spectrum of dawn. Cocktail glasses (180 ml; 6.3 imp fl oz) like Martini glasses (martini saucers), Margarita glasses, Coupe glasses, or an outward flaring Champagne Tulip flute (300 ml; 10 imps. fl. oz.), if you’d like to double the drink measurements – you get the point! Pointy bottom, with a flaring top; inverted cones or bells.
- If you are in and hotted up for the aesthetic of your drink, layer the grenadine at the bottom and maraschino syrup on top.
- Yellow-Flesh Peaches, Freestone Peaches, and Clingstone Peaches would work the best if you’re using fresh, homemade purée, as White-Flesh Peaches won’t do for the aesthetic we’re looking for.
- Your golden sunrise is ready; but you can top the game up with a final pleat of blue sky. To do this, mix blue food colour or blue curaçao syrup with the last few teaspoons of tea and layer the blue on top. Even better, freeze the mixture to make blue-coloured tea-ice, and garnish. It’s a rainbow at sunrise, sans the rain, in your glass, with the added goodwill of green tea and a cherry on top (well, bottom!). So why not go the extra dramatic-effect mile!
Green tea is less fermented and oxidised than the black variants, hence making it an ideal summertime choice. It is rich in antioxidants such as catechins that help you beat the heat. The benefits are best reaped when the leaves are steeped at 160 degrees Fahrenheit (74 to 85 degrees Celsius).
Most tea mocktails call for cold brewing, which means you cannot have your mocktail cuppa on the fly. But what is a refreshing, stimulating mocktail if you can’t enjoy your favourite tea when you still have to work? So, we have used hot brewing to stay more real to everyone’s needs, while brewing the best out of the leaves.
The bottom of this sunny, virgin and layered drink uses a mélange of fruits and fruity syrups to bid adieu to summer. After all, apricots were in season all spring and you must have stocked up on nectar. This is the berry season, making strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, blackberries, redcurrants, and loganberries market staple, and the cherry season is here too. Nectarines and peaches are available best from June as well. Eating seasonal fruits is proven to be the best for your health; the berries we mentioned – even more so. They too help you fight the sun.
You now have a cooling mocktail that you can enjoy all summer while it works wonders for your body against the sun.
