What is Concentrated Tea?

At Piper & Leaf, concentrated tea is our favorite brewing method – we use this style of brewing for all of our events, farmer’s markets, and shops! We brew the tea into a concentrated form (about 8 times stronger than a regular cup), then we make drinks by mixing 1 ounce of Concentrated Tea for every 7 ounces of water. For a sweet tea, the only change we make to our recipe is adding 1 ounce of simple syrup (cane sugar and water boiled together) and stirring it in. It’s that easy!

Concentrated Tea is an amazing and versatile brewing method that you can learn at home! Our new Piper Press Brew Kit makes it so easy to try it out for yourself.

How Can You Do This At Home?

With one of our brew kits, of course! We have two unique brew kits that make it easy to brew, store, and use Concentrated Tea at home. Each kit comes with everything you need to get started, including 2 bags of loose leaf tea!

Why Do We Prefer Concentrated Tea?

We make our tea in a concentrated form for a whole bunch of reasons!

1. It’s fast to make! With fresh-brewed tea, a cup can take anywhere from 3-10 minutes. Since the Concentrated Tea has already been steeped, all we have to do is mix it with water (and maybe some sugar). Each cup takes less than a minute!
2. It’s versatile! We can use Concentrated Tea to make a cup that’s hot or iced, sweet or unsweet, and even a combination of multiple flavors. Not only that, but the Concentrated Tea can be used in all kinds of recipes! In our shops, we mix concentrate with sparkling water, coffee, and frothed milk to make various specialty drinks.
   • At home, you can use it to make tea-popsicles, mix it into baked goods, add it to marinades, blend it into ice cream and smoothies, or make your own tea cocktails! Concentrate can be used in just about anything if you get creative with it

3. It’s easier to travel with! Did you know that we started out at local farmer’s markets? It’s much      easier to take gallons of water, sugar, and concentrate than to lug large containers full of pre-          mixed sweet tea and unsweet tea. Plus it was much easier to store just the Concentrated Tea in      the fridge than those giant containers of pre-mixed tea!

4. It’s consistent! As an example, when you’re brewing just one teaspoon of Lemon Berry Blush        loose leaf, you may scoop up more pieces of strawberries in one serving, while the next serving      you brew may get mostly lemongrass. This can lead to huge taste differences between cups of          tea. Since the Concentrated Tea is brewed in such large batches, those differences are no                longer a noticeable issue

Why Simple Syrup?

We use a double-strong simple syrup recipe to sweeten all of our drinks! All we do is mix 2 parts cane sugar with 1 part water and boil. True to its name, simple syrup is very simple. We sweeten our teas using this simple syrup for two reasons!

1. It doesn’t change the taste of the tea! Honey, agave, stevia, and other sweeteners all have a little bit of flavor on their own. This can change the flavor of the tea when they’re mixed together. Cane sugar is just sweet, since it has almost no taste of its own, so our blends stay more true to their intended flavors
2. It mixes in cold! Since our main focus when we first started out was iced tea at the farmer’s markets, we needed a way to sweeten the teas that would properly dissolve. Pure cane sugar, honey, and many other sweeteners easily mix into hot liquids, but take a LOT of stirring to dissolve into cold liquids. Simple syrup will, though! It only needs a quick stir to mix into a cup of tea, no matter if it’s hot or cold
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