Top Tea Cocktails

We recently returned from the World Tea Expo, which presented a fantastic array of products, tastings, seminars and the first-ever tea cocktail competition, which we were happy to help judge. Tea has been making it’s way into more and more cocktails lately, and it offers a lot of opportunity for experimentation. The cocktails in the Top Tea Cocktail Competition featured a range of teas and tisanes, and we saw lots of fresh herbs, fruits and everything from tequila to gin.

The winning recipe came from Max Solano of Table 10 in Las Vegas, whose herbaceous cocktail combined blackberry jasmine iced green tea with gin, Agwa coca leaf liqueur, lime juice, vanilla/clove syrup and egg white (click here for the full recipe). Max’s cocktail was incredibly balanced and smooth, and the egg white gave it a great texture. “Tea as a cocktail ingredient is still an area that has not been well explored or utilized in the realm of modern mixology,” Max told us recently. “It’s not always seamless finding the right ingredients to go along with the right tea or vice versa. I would like to be one of the first in my field to really master tea and its implementation in cocktails.”

We hope to see more interaction between tea and cocktails, as the results can be incredibly delicious—congrats to Max for offering such a perfect example of this!