Tea Review: Thai Iced Tea by Wang Derm

I absolutely love a good thai tea - but supporting my habit of how often I crave one is not realistic considering how much they cost to buy.  When I found this at Cost Plus World Market I was excited... yet dubious.  Having watched so many tea baristas at bubble tea joints build my thai teas in front of me, I knew that there was more to it than just a tea bag - but my understanding of tea also made me realize that the most important building block of the drink HAD to be the tea itself.  I was right.

This stuff is like no other tea I've reviewed before in that I won't even CONSIDER drinking this stuff straight off the steep.  It's dark but instead of getting coffee black dark, it gets dark orange.  It gets bitter if you oversteep, but the bitter doesn't taste like the tannin overload of an oversteeped black tea... but I don't have the words to describe what it DOES taste like oversteeped.  It's just... nasty.

So, the box has instructions on how to take the brewed tea bag and make it into a single served Thai Iced Tea - but I tend to to like to make bigger batches of the base so that when I mix it up to complete the drink the base is already cold.  You see, mixing it according to the box has you chill the base by pouring it over ice, but I find that this waters down the tea too much.  Unsurprisingly, I like the tea flavor in my thai iced tea to be on the stronger side.  As such, it took me some work to figure out how long to steep it so that it would be strong enough to stand up to the sugar and milk without being disgustingly oversteeped.

So, what are the other steps to making this a good thai iced tea?  The box says sugar and milk, but in truth what you need is simple syrup and condensed milk.  Sugar makes the drink grainy and milk or cream makes the drink too watery.  Simple syrup sweetens while keeping the texture smooth and condensed milk creams while adding a bit of thickness.  It's easy to make your own simple syrup, true, but why make all that effort when you can just pick up a bottle of it from the mixer section near the booze in your local grocery?  I'm lucky in that my local grocery also carries squeeze bottles of condensed milk by the cans in the baking aisle as well - but transferring a can into a refillable squeeze bottle at home is an easy option as well.

At any rate - I've had other Thai Tea bag blends since finding this one, but many don't give as sharp a taste as I want and leave me with a weak mix so this is the brand that I've found that I think is the best for a good make at home Thai Iced Tea.