Name: Spirit of Tea
Ingredients: 4 ounces of tea; 9 pints of brandy; 1 pint of boiling water

Why it works: Tea and brandy work together. They rank in the top 19% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 121 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Spirit of Tea

Ingredients

4 ounces of tea
9 pints of brandy
1 pint of boiling water

Directions

Make the infusion

Make a decoction of 4 ounces of tea in 1 pint of boiling water.
Let it steep for 2 hours.
Pour the tea into a jug with 9 pints of brandy.
Let it infuse for 8 days.

Distill

Distill the mixture to yield 5 pints.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

Tea + brandytop 19% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together121 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Tea: Supplies the aroma and flavour that the spirit takes up during infusion.
Brandy: Acts as the base spirit that extracts and carries the tea's flavour.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.