Tonight I’m trying to master the perfect pitcher of iced tea. Perfect to me is something unsweetened, snappy and refreshing like what I can get at any local Tex-mex place at lunch. It’s not as easy as Lipton would have me believe. I bought some Lipton tea bags the other day, the first pitcher was awful — extremely bitter. The directions called for 2 quarts of boiling water, 2 family-sized tea bags, seep for 5 minutes then chill.
Not really a fan of tea bags nowadays I bought some Lipton loose tea to try. Followed some internet directions, 1.5 liters of boiling water, seeped for 3 hours and chilled. It was cloudy and bitter. I cheated and added some lemon juice; still cloudy and knocked out a bit of the bitterness. Still unacceptable.
Everyone on the internet has their own opinions on what constitutes the perfect tea. Some call for seeping for hours, even overnight; seep for a few minutes, let it come to room temperature; use cold water and set the jug out in the sun for 4-5 hours. I really want to believe restaurants aren’t adding sugar or simple syrup to their allegedly unsweetened tea. If anything, I have plenty of tea and water to keep trying until I figure it out.
At the moment I’ve got two pitchers in the making. One was made with 1.5 liters of boiling water (can we please do away with ‘cups’ and ‘quarts’ and stick with mililiters?), 2 tablespoons of loose tea, seeped 10 minutes, now cooling to room temperature on its own. The other jug was one family-sized (6 gram) of not-for-cold-water tea, and 4 cups of cold water. Interestingly, I had to weigh down the teabag with a spatula because it floated on the cold water. So far after an hour, the boiled water tea is a very dark red and the cold water tea barely has any color at all.
In other news, I discovered some outfit called the “Ultra Marathon Cycling Association” holds a “Austin 200k” once a year in January. Allegedly it’s as tough as it gets around here. The route this year started in Bee Caves, looped around Mansfield Dam, down to Southwest Austin over Lost Creek (some extremely steep climbs), out Fitzhugh Road to Johnson City — and back. This guy claims the route is 127 miles long with 10,000 feet of elevation gain. I drove part of Fitzhugh Road to Dripping Springs today, it’s a shoulderless two-lane country road with lots of rolling hills. That, along with the Lost Creek, Loop 360, and Mansfield Dam portions, I can certainly believe it involves 10,000 feet of climbing.
