Good morning,

Well here in the UK I must admit we love our tea and I am one of those people who love it.  So I had a think and a scour around the internet, recipe books and any other source I could get my hands on to find a decent tea cocktail.  I certainly found one in the Earl Grey Mar-tea-ni.  I am new to infusing alcohol but must admit it is very addictive once you begin, all I want to do is infuse spirits with new flavours now.  Anyway, back to the tea cocktail.  I now prefer to infuse my gin with the tea leaves prior to making this cocktail but if you haven’t got the time, don’t want to risk your precious gin or you’re a little lazy then you can always brew some tea in a mug and use a mere 35ml of the stuff to mix in your cocktail.  A little more on that later (that’s cheating anyhow!)

Right, onto the infusion.  I know it says in many places to infuse 1 litre of a Gin with a 1/4 cup of tea, but I didn’t want to be having my first go infusing tea with Gin on a 1 litre bottle because if I made a mess of it, made it too strong etc then I would have been a little devastated.  So, scaling the ingredients down a little, I tried it on a mere 375ml of Gin, enough to let the household sample the delights of this cocktail aswell as me!  So I went with 375ml of Gin and 1 1/2 table spoons of tea leaves.

Now onto the cocktail..   I used

- 50ml Infused Tea Gin

- 20ml Lemon Juice

- 12.5ml Sugar Syrup

- 1/2 fresh egg white

I like my drinks to be ‘froffy’ (if thats how you even spell that), so I combined all the ingredients in the shaker with no ice and give it a good old shake for 10 seconds.  I then added ice and give it another good old shake.  I then double strained the drink into a beautifully chilled martini glass.  The final twist was a lemon one! (i.e. garnish)…

Well, my infusing is going onto the next level, I was going to start taking my own pictures of the cocktails as I’ve just got myself a new Canon Digital SLR, so who know, next time you may see some snaps!  On a final note, I really enjoyed making this cocktail from start to finish and I know there are 1001 alternatives to this recipe, this came out very nicely and it went down a treat at home!

Thanks for reading,

Andy