Club Mate - Sparkling Mate Tea
The Ultimate Effervescent Pick-me-up
Today I want to share a recipe for an amazing drink I have gotten to drink a bunch here in Germany called Club mate. This is a slightly sweet mate tea drink that is carbonated and is full of caffeine. With the nice sweet slightly smokey flavor that comes from the mate tea, it's much better than any energy drink you can buy, and it goes with vodka a lot better too ;)
This drink is nice and refreshing, and one benefit of having the syrup is that you can control the strength or flavor of the club matte to suite your pallete.
Detailed Instructions:
Making the Tea
The first thing we are going to need is some yerbe mate tea leaves. For those who haven't seen it before it's a South American tea which contains a nice amount of caffeine. This stuff has gotten pretty popular in the past few years so you may be able to find it in your local supermarket, if not you should easily be able to find it online or specialty teas store. So of this stuff we need roughly 250 mL or one cup of tea leaves loosely packed, this may seem like a lot but I wanted to make a lot of it in one go, feel free to reduce the amount to make less.
Next we will need a method for brewing our tea. for me I will be using a french press that I have laying around. We need to steep the tea in water that has a tempurature of around 70 degrees Celsius or 160 degrees Fahrenheit. With the water up to temperature we can pour in our leaves and let this steep for about 5 minutes, making sure that all of the leaves are submerged. After the leaves are done steeping we can push the plunger down separating the leaves from the tea. As you can see my french press didn't do the best of jobs, so we will need to do some secondary filtering to remove all the stragglers.
What we are left with is essentially a delicious strong yerbe mate tea which we need to reduce into a tea syrup. To do this, heat the tea and boil the water away. While it is hot, it's a good opportunity to add our sweetener. In my case I will be using 50 mL of agave syrup here, just because I really like the taste of it with this tea, but feel free to use sugar or whatever else you want, sweetening to taste. Just keep in mind that we are making a syrup that we will dilute with sparkling water later, so it should be a lil’ sweeter than the final version.
We can then begin to heat this thing in earnest, and once the tea has reduced by about a factor of 1/2, we can pull it off the heat. We should let this cool down a little, and we can prepare the last ingredient, the citrus. The original recipe is just with citric acid, but we may as well use citrus juice here, I am using the juice from 1 orange, and the juice from 1 lemon here. Once the syrup has cooled a little, we can add the juice in, and that's basically it!
To make the drink, we just need to add a portion of our syrup, and some sparking water and bob's your uncle we are done!
See you all soon!
Condensed Recipe:
Ingredients:
1 Cup [250 mL] of yerbe mate tea leaves
2 Tablespoons [50 mL] of honey or agave syrup
1 orange
1 lemon
Soda water
Instructions:
Heat water to 160F or 70C and pour into French press. Add tea leaves and allow to steep for 5 minutes.
Strain tea, pouring into a saucepan. Add honey and begin boiling mixture to reduce.
Once tea has reduced by a factor of 2, pull off heat and add the juice of one lemon and one orange.
Once syrup is cool, add roughly 1 tablespoon of syrup to sparkling water and mix.
Enjoy!