A strong green tea shaken over ice with muddled lemon and lime. Boiling water, but only 90 seconds on the bags: strong enough to survive the ice, the syrup, and the juice, short enough not to turn tannic. Brew the tea batch once, build the glasses one at a time.

Ingredients

(A) Tea — makes 5 glasses

   
1000g water
10 green tea bags

(B) Per glass

   
¼ lemon, cut into 3 pieces
⅛ lime, cut into 2 pieces
15g simple syrup
200g tea (A), hot
  ice, for the shaker and for the glass

Steps

  1. Bring the water to a boil. Add the tea bags, take the pot off the heat, and steep 90 seconds.

  2. Pull the bags out without squeezing them. Use the tea hot, straight into step 4, or cool and refrigerate it for later glasses.

  3. Put the lemon and lime pieces in a cocktail shaker with the simple syrup. Muddle 5–10 firm presses — enough to break the flesh and press oil out of the peel. Stop before the pith turns to pulp.

  4. Fill the shaker halfway with ice and pour in 200g of the hot tea. It will hiss and melt some of the ice; that is the dilution the strong brew is built for.

  5. Seal and shake 20–30 seconds, until the shaker is frosted and a head of foam forms.

  6. Strain into a glass filled with fresh ice.

Notes

  • Boiling water, 90 seconds — not a long boil. Bags are fannings, not whole leaf: far more surface area, so they extract much faster than any loose-leaf timing implies. Heat past about two minutes stops buying strength and only buys astringency — the sweet, savory compound comes out regardless of temperature while tannin and caffeine keep climbing. Boiled five minutes, the drink reads bitter under the sugar rather than strong.
  • Brew strong anyway — just not that way. A hard shake adds roughly 25–30% water from the melting ice, before the fresh ice in the glass. The base needs to be about 1.3× drinking strength to land right. A brief steep at full heat gets there; a long one overshoots into tannin.
  • Pour the tea in hot. Hot tea over ice flash-chills it and keeps the aroma; tea left to cool slowly in the pot goes flat and dull.
  • If it still reads harsh, rinse the bags 5 seconds in cold water and throw that water away before the real steep. It strips surface tannin and costs almost nothing in strength.
  • Later glasses, from chilled tea: use about half as much ice in the shaker. Cold tea melts almost none of it, so a full shaker’s worth of ice makes an under-diluted, over-sweet drink. Shake 15 seconds and add 30–50g water if it reads syrupy.
  • Simple syrup is 1:1 sugar to water by weight — dissolve hot, cool before use. 15g per 200g tea is light (~7.5%); go to 25–30g for boba-shop sweetness. Honey works but must go into the tea while it is hot.
  • Keep the peel on when you muddle. The rind oil carries most of the citrus smell; the juice alone is sour but thin.
  • Strain the citrus out for a clean glass, or tip the muddled pieces in with the tea if you want it to keep getting more bitter and more aromatic as it sits.
  • Brewed tea keeps 2 days refrigerated with the bags removed. Leave the bags in and it turns harsh within hours.
  • Sencha or a plain bagged green tea is what this is built for. To push it stronger, change the tea, not the timing: hojicha, genmaicha, and bancha are made to take 212°F water, so they take 2–3 minutes with no bitterness penalty — genmaicha’s toasted note is good against the lemon. Jasmine green tea changes the drink outright, and for the better if you like it.
  • For the least bitter version, cold brew it: 15g tea in 1000g cold water, 8–12 hours in the fridge. Best with citrus of any method here, but there is no hot tea to flash-chill, so use less ice in the shaker.
  • Scales as a ratio: 1 tea bag per 100g water, then 15g syrup and ¼ lemon per 200g of tea.