While tea can be an elegant base for liqueurs and bitters, aptly balancing sweetness and rounded mouthfeel with its bitterness and tannic quality, it lends itself just as beautifully to spirits such as vodka and gin.
Especially for small-batch distillers, tea also offers a wide range of options for use and tremendous potential for experimentation. For starters, you can simply cold-brew tea with vodka, gin, or whiskey—that should give you an initial understanding of how the flavors work together, guiding your choice for which spirit to make with which type of tea.
We brew tea, we infuse tea—and, as some resourceful producers are proving, we can distill it, too.
A Southern Tradition: Firefly’s Sweet Tea Vodka
Vodka made with sweet tea was the “genesis of Firefly itself,” says Jay Macmurphy, head distiller at the company based in Charleston, South Carolina.
Macmurphy’s mother Ann and stepfather Jim Irvin were running a winery when Irvin befriended a distributor in the wine business, Scott Newitt, and they decided to go into business together. Noticing that fewer people reached for wine during hot Southern summers, they set their sights on spirits. While in California, Newitt stumbled upon some green-tea vodka; he and Irvin decided they needed to make something like that for the South, based on the region’s beloved sweet tea.
Much experimentation ensued, Macmurphy says—from using tea to proof down vodka to actually brewing tea with vodka instead of water. That quickly proved unsuccessful because of the nitrates produced when they heated alcohol with tea leaves.
“The final product tasted like hot dogs and Band-Aids,” he says. “It was awful.”
So, Irvin called a flavor house to ask about developing a proprietary tea blend. The Firefly team received samples, tasting and tinkering until they settled on the perfect tea. While sweet tea is virtually always made from black tea, the blend for Firefly’s vodka includes both black and oolong, with tea leaves of different ages.
Firefly made an early iteration of its Sweet Tea Vodka with a base of distilled muscadine grape wine, since Irvin’s previous business was a winery. The team also processed the tea themselves, concentrating it via a process called folding:
- They would cold-brew the tea, letting it sit in cool water for 24 hours.
- They would then put the tea into fermentors and freeze it.
- When thawed, the sugars would melt first because they have a lower melting point than water. They’d capture that melt—with all its concentrated tea flavor—and dispose of the ice.
- They would then repeat that process 100 times.
Despite the sugar content, tea concentrated to such an extent is highly bitter, so it needs additional sugar to be palatable. Being from Louisiana, Newitt suggested cane sugar sourced from the state.
Today, their supplier completes that folding process, and the base spirit is distilled from 100 percent corn. To create their Sweet Tea Vodka, Macmurphy says, they need a lot of tea to ensure its delicate flavors don’t get lost to the ethanol. They pull from their bulk vodka, and Macmurphy’s daughter Riley—Firefly’s head blender—blends the vodka with the tea and sugar, proofing it down to 70. After a series of rigorous tests—taste, proof, density, and clarity—it moves into bottling tanks.
Firefly is now a large enough operation to work with suppliers and have a lab to perfect its flavors, but the product that started it all flowed from the distillery’s tanks when they were still a small, scrappy operation. The secret, Macmurphy says, was simply a commitment to endless experimentation, especially when it came to balancing black tea’s bitter flavors.
For small distilleries interested in working with tea, the answer might involve collaboration with a local tea supplier or roaster. They should have more in-depth knowledge of tea’s vast varieties, what would work for more bitterness or sweetness, how teas can be blended to achieve the right balance, and how to process it so that you can work with it in the distillery.
Asian Teas in American-Made Gin
Wan Di and James Park, cofounders of Guilder’s Gin, were both experimenting with tea in the alcohol space before they even met.
When out with friends, Di would mix tea with beer to create a lower-ABV option. For similar reasons, Park would blend tea with soju. Di was a nuclear physicist before committing to tea and opening a showroom in New York City; Park went into wine importing, and he was partner in a restaurant located around the corner from Di’s tea shop. Park began spending time there, and Di and Park started sharing their experiments.
When both the showroom and restaurant closed during the COVID pandemic, they thought of opening a business around tea cocktails—but didn’t want another physical location. Park’s experiments in mixing tea with gin were proving especially successful, and the two settled on that spirit for their endeavor.
Those experiments began as infusions, evaluating how nearly every type of tea expressed its flavors when steeped in different spirits. Industry friendships enabled them to experiment in distilleries, incorporating the teas via gin baskets and macerations at different temperatures.
The first major hurdle was simply choosing teas—especially considering Di’s wide-ranging access. They tried hundreds, eventually landing on green and oolong, respectively, for their Guilder’s Gin Green Tea and Guilder’s Gin Red Oolong; they also make a Canton Dry Gin whose botanicals include goji berries, which are also used to make teas in China and Korea.
They source the oolong from a single roaster, who gets the leaves from a single plot; they get the green tea from one family-owned farm. Both suppliers are in Taiwan and have won multiple awards and distinctions.
“We landed on these because of the way they interact with the alcohol,” Park says. “Some teas don’t lend themselves all that well. With the high alcohol percentage of gin … a lot of the more delicate teas lose the fight between the alcohol and the tea.”
Farmers harvest the teas by hand, and they arrive in New York vacuum-sealed. Di hand-roasts the teas to remove further moisture. He also loosens the rolled oolong leaves to give them more surface area for flavor extraction.
“It takes him six to eight weeks per batch,” Park says. “We use massive amounts. Each harvest brings in close to a ton of tea. We use a majority of it for a batch, and the batch produces 5,500 to 6,000 bottles.”
Park and Di add the tea flavors via maceration as well as including it in the gin basket. “We found if we don’t do a maceration, a lot of teas blend to just this ‘tea-leaf’ flavor,” Park says. “You don’t get the distinct differences between roasters and regions.”
They macerate at about 40°F (4°C)—the time changes batch to batch, depending on the tea, but it never takes a full day. Park and Di continuously test the maceration, so they can remove the tea at the perfect moment.
As far as the other botanicals in the basket, Park says they use less juniper than standard gins while also adding goji.
He says they also had to figure out how to maintain one very specific flavor.
“There’s a Taiwanese tea bug—the tea green leafhopper (Jacobiasca formosana)—in the Taiwanese mountains that comes around every 10 years and bites the tea leaves,” Park says. “It leaves this honey-like scent, and that actually qualifies tea for a much higher grade. We were lucky that that had happened for our first batch, but the second batch wasn’t bitten by the bugs, so we had to work differently to retain that. … It’s not sweet, it’s just this aroma of honey.”
Guilder’s Gin launched in 2023. The Canton Dry is very floral, while the Green Tea is robustly fresh with roasted green-tea characteristics, and the Red Oolong has aromatics of dark chocolate, coffee, and honey—Park sees the last as a sipping gin, even if that’s still a challenging concept for consumers.
The reception to all three has been strong, Park says, especially when Park and Di are able to engage with people directly via tastings. The bar-and-restaurant community has shown great interest, putting the Red Oolong and Green Tea into everything from gimlets, gin fizzes, sours, and highballs to negronis, old fashioneds, and martinis.
As venues look to keep up with trends by incorporating tea into cocktails, spirits such as Guilder’s Gin can streamline the process while providing a novel update on a classic category.