Iced Green Tea

Iced green tea

I debated about making this a blog post, mostly because it's so easy, I feel like I'm cheating. But then again, sometimes you just need to have your a-ha moment and I had mine last weekend.

I love/hate Starbucks. 

I love Starbucks because they make drinks that are too elaborate for me to make at home. I hate Starbucks because of how expensive it is. And that it's been made into a verb. Starbucksing hurts my ears.

Anyway, my favourite drinks at Starbucks are mostly revolving around tea.

There's the soy earl grey tea latte with sugar free vanilla syrup. (When it's cold)

And in the summer, nothing NOTHING is better than a nice iced tea from Starbucks.

I don't always get the same thing, as I like to experiment with the different teas/syrups Starbucks has.

If I want something fruity, I get an iced passion tea. If I want something sweet, I get an iced raspberry black tea lemonade. Those are a treat though as they are quite sweet.

Most recently, I've been partial to iced green tea.

Not just iced green tea. Venti iced green tea, half sweet, light ice.

After getting 3 of these suckers in 2 days, I decided I would not fall victim to paying $3.00 for tea. That's like, the rules of feminism.

So, I went home and made my own batch of iced green tea and let me tell you, it tasted EXACTLY like the ones I got at Starbucks. Probably because I used the same tea. Whatever, I'm still proud of my discovery.

Since making it, I've been thinking of all the possibilities this brings forth. Green tea with frozen raspberries? YUM. Iced green tea with lemon and orange slices? YUM!

Anyway, here's how I did it.

I used my coffee maker because I don't have a kettle. I know. I'm poor, it's fine. I do things the cracker jack way.

First, I THOROUGHLY rinsed my coffee pot and the basket where the coffee grinds go and brewed just water a few times to get as much coffee taste out of the machine so the water used for the tea wouldn't have a weird coffee aftertaste.

Then I put two Tazo Zen green tea bags right into my coffee pot with the string/tab hanging out so I could easily grab them and take the bags out.

I brewed about 8 cups of water into the coffeepot and steeped the tea for like five minutes. 

I know. This process is pretty technical and complicated.

While the tea was brewing/steeping, I heated up 3/4 cup water and 3/4 cup sugar together to make simple syrup. I felt like this made my tea pretty sweet so you might want to just use 1/3 cup each or 1/2 cup. As long as they are equal amounts. I heated it on medium/low heat while stirring until all the sugar was melted and mixed in with the water. Didn't take long at all.

When the tea was done steeping (I just waited until it looked the same colour as what I get in my Starbucks cup), I added a few ice cubes into it and the simple syrup because I wanted to try it right away.

That barely cooled it down, so into the fridge it went.

I'm pretty impatient, so after a half hour or so, I filled a glass full of ice and poured myself a glass of my homemade iced green tea and let me tell you. It. Was. Refreshing.

I can't believe I've written this much about iced green tea.

OK cost wise, as this is a BUDGET friendly blog, an 8 cup batch cost me about $1.

One. Dollar. For. Eight. Cups.

So, for a venti size of this, I'm looking at about $0.33.

I can't even deal with these savings. Actually, I can't deal with how I've been paying like 100 times that at Starbucks when I could have easily been making it at home.

Shame on me.

Anyway, here are the benefits of drinking green tea, if you needed any more convincing other than how delicious this concoction is.