Current Quandary

It’s been swealtering in Pittsburgh the past week, with temperatures in the 90s and humidity making it feel even hotter. It’s the perfect weather to sip iced tea, and so I’ve been brewing it. But every batch I brew (using my coffee maker and Lipton loose tea) turns cloudy.

Now murky, opaque tea doesn’t taste any less refreshing, but it sure doesn’t look as refreshing as clear tea and so it does tend to hamper the whole kick-back-on-the-deck-with-a-tall-cool-glass experience. I’d always heard cooling the tea too quickly can cause it to cloud, so I’d let the tea come to room temperature first before putting it in the fridge. The next morning, though, it was cloudy. I thought perhaps I had the rule of thumb backwards, and maybe it was better to cool it quickly. So several days later — after everyone in my household finally accepted that I wasn’t just going to dump the cloudy tea down the drain and so they grudgingly drank it — I brewed a new pitcher and immediately cooled it down with ice. Still cloudy.

I hopped on TeaChat and everyone swears that cooling slowly will avoid clouding. Other avoidance tactics include using soft water (which I have) and leaving the tea bag in the pitcher, which I can’t really do since I’m brewing loose leaf through a coffee filter. The folks at Strand Tea say that some tea leaves, such as Ceylon and China Black, don’t cloud when iced. My Lipton loose leaf box says it contains orange Pekoe, so perhaps that’s been my problem.

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