Well, I’m back. I hope that you folks didn’t mind the content rewind while I recovered from the nasty cold that my wife picked up on an airplane and brought home with her. Now that I’m back, I thought I would share one of the things that helped get me through the coughing fits. Nothing helps coughing or the sore throat that it can bring quite like a hot drink. And if that hot drink has a touch of bourbon in it, well, that just makes things a little nicer, doesn’t it?
According to Southern Living, Russian Tea is a staple hot drink listed in many an old church cookbook down South, though it seems to be virtually unheard of here in the Upper Midwest. The recipe that I grew up drinking used three-quarters of a cup of Lipton Instant Tea, a cup of powdered Tang, a packet of Kool-Aid lemonade, a teaspoon each of cinnamon and cloves, and enough sugar to make you love it. My mom used about a cup and a quarter. I usually cut that down to a cup or less. (Though if unsweetened Kool-Aid packets are as hard to find for you as they are for me, you can leave out the sugar altogether and substitute enough of a presweetened lemonade mix to make two quarts of lemonade into the mix instead.) Then you’d add a few spoonfuls of the powdered mix into a cup of hot water and enjoy.
Now, as I said, my family has been making this instant powdered version of Russian Tea for years (sans bourbon, sadly). And, once I moved out of the trailer court and mixed with folks that had never lived in a house with wheels, I used to get a lot of strange looks from coworkers when I would bring the drink mix out. Apparently, the thought of instant tea, Tang, and Kool-Aid offended their more upper-class sensibilities. But they’d usually come around once they tasted the spicy, sweet concoction.
And so, in the back of my mind, I always had the idea of trying to recreate the recipe from the non-instant forms of the ingredients. The sort of thing you could brew beforehand and then warm up for a family gathering instead of trying to make it a cup at a time. In my experiments, I used the same ratios as the instant version. I didn’t use your usual Lipton teabags for my version. I wanted to eliminate the grit at the bottom of the cup that the spices bring to the instant version, so I thought of using Chai instead. Now my local grocery store didn’t have a chai in their tea section for some reason, so I settled on Good Earth Tea’s Sweet and Spicy teabags instead. And damn if it didn’t turn out even more delicious than the original recipe.
And better yet, it paired great with an ounce of bourbon.
Russian Tea, the BourbonGuy Way
6 parts Good Earth Sweet and Spicy tea, brewed according to the instructions
2 part lemonade
2 part orange juice
1 part Wild Turkey 101 bourbon
Mix together the tea and juices. Warm the mixture to about 170° F. Add bourbon and serve in a mug. Garnish with an orange or lemon slice, if you are feeling fancy.
We mixed up a large batch to keep in the fridge and then just reheated it as we went. But you could just as easily do it a cup at a time. The recipe above fits my favorite mug if you define “one part” as one fluid ounce. I think I nailed it with this one. Instead of just being my “oh shit, I’m sick” drink, this recipe will be coming back for the long northern winters as well.
Did you enjoy this post? If you want to support the work going on here at BourbonGuy.com, please consider a one-time donation at ko-fi.com/bourbonguy or paypal.me/BourbonGuy. Or you could buy some merch (tasting journals, stickers, pins, posters, and more) at BourbonGuyGifts.com.