Coffee Flavored Tea?

On Teachat today there was a bit of an ongoing discussion about the validity or usefulness of coffee flavored tea. There was a general consensus that one or the other was great, or as Mary put it, "Having one or the other is vastly preferable to trying for a pale imitation of both." But there was one person who passionately argued for it.

"There are so many varieties of tea," she said (I think its a she), "and someone to drink each of them." Good point.

So I got to thinking how would they make such a thing. No company would probably make a serious attempt at producing a high quality coffee flavored tea, just some BOP and coffee extract or flavoring tossed in a teabag.

As much as I dislike flavored teas, I have always had more respect for ones that were made with "real" ingredients. I don't want to drink a blueberry tea, but if I did, I'd prefer one that was using dried blueberries as opposed to an extract. So I decided to take that approach, which required a quick jaunt to the store.

I don't know much about coffee other than drinking it, so from this point it was all guess work. We were out of my preferred choice, Colombian, so I went with Organic Guatemalan instead. For some reason I didn't want to grind it (which it turns out might have yielded better results), so I decided it to chop the whole beans with a knife.

Now there was the question of tea. Should I use a malty Assam or Dian Hong or something else. This person seems fond of oolong, and I just got some shui xian that I thought would compliment the coffee. Maybe it didn't have to be a "pale version of both." The shui xian had a thinner body with a strong chocolate presence. Chocolate and coffee, that should go together.

It didn't. The first attempt was a failure. I used 2.5 g of chopped coffee beans and 3.5 g of shui xian for a 150 ml, and all I got was a slight finish of coffee. It seemed that maybe the coffee needed to be ground to release the flavors. I don't have a grinder, so I took some more beans and made do with a cutting board and a heavy jar.

I was only indulging a whim, so I was unwilling to waste any more shui xian on it, so I used a qi lan instead, something I could easily replace. Unfortunately, still no luck. It seems that Mary was right. For it to taste like coffee, it will inevitably over power the tea, and vice versa.

Oh well, I am only out about a dollar's worth of tea and coffee. A small price to pay for a reminder to be open-minded.