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Tea Liqueur

A liqueur made by steeping green tea in brandy and sweetening with refined sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Green tea and tea share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 19 recipes. Both carry 4-heptenal, which smells creamy, biscuit. The science ↓

Tea Liqueur

Ingredients

Directions

Make the infusion

  1. Pour 1½ cups of boiling water over 4 ounces of green tea and let it boil briefly.

  2. Remove from heat and let it steep until lukewarm.

  3. Pour the strong infusion into a tightly closed jar with 2 gallons of brandy and let it steep for 8 days.

  4. Check the aroma; if it lacks a strong tea scent, infuse 2 more ounces of tea in ½ cup of water and add it to the brandy for another 8 days.

Finish and bottle

  1. After steeping, boil the mixture down by half in a water bath.

  2. Dissolve 5 pounds of refined sugar in 4 quarts of tea infusion or 4 quarts of water, then add it to the brandy and filter.

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.

  1. Green tea + teatop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together19 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).

  2. Green tea + brandytop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together50 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl benzoate (sweet).

  3. Brandy + teatop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together121 recipes

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

  4. Brandy + sugartop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together11,939 recipes

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

  5. Green tea + sugartop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together159 recipes

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

Brandy and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 11,939 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Green tea
Provides the main tea flavour and aroma that the brandy takes up during steeping.
Brandy
Acts as the solvent that extracts flavour from the tea and preserves the liqueur.
Refined sugar
Adds sweetness and body, balancing the strong tea and alcohol flavours.

The step that matters

Checking the aroma before adding more tea. Tea flavour builds slowly in alcohol, and judging by smell after the first steep decides whether the extra tea is needed. Cutting the steep short leaves the liqueur weak in aroma.

“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.

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