Tea has a bit of a reputation in the American alcohol trade, one that is ingrained and challenging to change. While tea is the world’s second most popular beverage, when it comes to its combination with alcohol, the image of the ready-to-drink hard tea brands dominate.
“When a lot of people think of tea, especially in the hard beverage industry, they already have a Mike’s Hard Iced Tea or Twisted Tea flavor profile in mind,” says Chris Cason of Firsd Tea. “For us, we need to shake that and say there are way more flavors available than that flavor profile in general.”
Cason has long been fighting against this limited view of the value of tea and other botanicals in beverage alcohol, joking that America’s view of tea dates back to the Boston Tea Party. “I still think we’re in our infancy stages of what beer can do with tea<” he says. He points to coffee as an adjunct by way of comparison. “Every coffee or every beer company has their coffee stout, that’s pretty much a standard SKU. I don’t think tea has really gotten its day in the sun yet.”
Firsd Tea imports around 25-percent of all organic tea and botanicals in the United States as the American subsidiary of parent company, Zhejiang Tea Group, Ltd, which is China’s largest tea exporter and the world leader in green tea exports. Firsd Tea directly sources green, black, and oolong tea and other botanicals directly from its parent company’s farms, including everything from peppermint to Lemon Myrtle to hibiscus.
“The sky is kind of the limit with [tea and botanicals], it’s just a matter of education, and that’s why I think a lot of brewers are so hesitant to use them,” Cason says. One concern brewers have when using tea and other botanicals is determining how much to use to achieve their desired flavors and aromas and where in the process to use them. Firsd Tea is currently working with brewers and universities to answer these questions. Brewers frequently ask whether they should use them during the boil or on the cold side. To help provide answers, Firsd Tea worked with the University of Colorado Boulder to develop industry standards for dosing rates for tea in beer. “With tea, it’s about time, temperature, and volume,” Cason says. “So far we’ve tackled volume, how much tea to put in beer to get the right flavor. And this year we’re tackling temperature, whether to put it on the hot side or the cold side.”
“Tea is an alternative to hops,” Cason suggests. “Tea can provide a lot of similar flavors, including a little bit of bitterness, but it can be finicky. Hops can be finicky if you put them in too long or too hot, and the tannins, the bitter stuff, just comes out in a similar way. So we’re figuring out how to dial it in and in just get those flavors that you want without the off flavors that you don’t.”
The research has yielded practical advice for brewers contemplating recipes with tea or botanicals. “We found that the sweet spot is doing it on the cold side and infusing tea leaves on the cold side,” Cason says. “From a logistics point of view, a lot of brewers are used to using hop bags. The problem with tea is that it’s like a sponge, where it triples in size when you infuse it into liquid. We found brewers having a lot of trouble getting the tea leaves out after we put them in. So we’ve started telling people we recommend using smaller amounts in multiple hop bags instead of one big hop bag.”
Cason also recommends using about two pounds of loose tea per barrel as a sweet spot. He has seen brewers steep tea and botanicals for 24 hours in a process similar to dry hopping, but notes the resulting flavor will be intense. Others have done as little as two hours. He recommends considering the strength of the underlying beer style, where a longer steep might overwhelm a Blonde Ale while a Porter or Stout may stand up better over longer times.
Cason draws a comparison between tea and other botanicals and hops, specifically dry hopping. “A lot of brewers are using [tea and botanicals] in a similar way now to how they were using hops ten years ago,” he says. “We always tell people, taste it after a couple hours. It’s similar to dry hopping, it’s kind of art, kind of science.”
Firsd Tea’s tea and botanical offerings offer brewers a wide range of different flavor and aroma opportunities and Cason is happy to work with brewers on finding the right options and even blends to meet their needs. “Brewers usually come to us looking for a certain flavor profile,” he says. He notes that one brewer approached him about making the flavor in its pumpkin stout more complex. Cason suggested using a Masala Chai infused tea, with its notes of cardamom, cloves, cinnamon, ginger, and vanilla. “It plays with the pumpkin spice-esque flavor very well, but is still above that, because it also has black tea in it. It’s a little more complex than your basic Starbucks pumpkin spice flavor,” he laughs.
For brewers looking to mimic the flavors of citrus-focused, sour, or barrel aged beers, Firsd Tea also has suggestions. “A brewer will come up to me and say, ‘we have a sour and want to brighten the flavor without adding any more sourness, do you have anything that can do that?’” Cason cites Lemon Myrtle from Australia and its intense concentration of lemon flavor as a great option. “It has that lemon flavor that you get out of a lemon, but without any of the citric acid that would make it sour,” he says.
Cason and Firsd Tea have worked with a lot of kombucha breweries on their custom blends and that has informed his work with breweries. “We even have a brewery that is trying to do a similar flavor profile to barrel aging,” he says. “They’re looking for barrel character, with a lot of vanilla, coconut, and earthy notes. And we have teas out there, for example, a rooibos tea from South Africa, that mimics barrel notes.” He further suggests mixing in Pu’er, a dark, fermented tea from China that tastes earthy because it is traditionally buried in the ground after production to develop greater flavor.
Cason notes that Firsd Tea can work with breweries to create custom blends to meet their needs. “Our biggest hurdle right now is educating the brewers that tea can do that.”