Easy Iced Tea Recipes: Ginger, Mango, Moroccan Mint, Iced Chai and Mocktails

A gentle warmth of ginger in a cool glass. The ginger goes into a syrup, so you can sweeten each glass to taste.

Keeping the ginger out of the teapot is the point of the recipe. Ginger is strong, and simmered with sugar it gives up its heat to the syrup, while the tea is steeped only as long as green tea needs. Each glass then gets as much ginger as the drinker wants.

Choose a sturdy green for this one. Our blending notes warn that with a light first flush Darjeeling you should “avoid strong, intensely aromatic flavors like cardamom or ginger,” because “these flavors overpower the inherent flavor of the tea.” Plain whole-leaf Darjeeling Green Tea holds its own against the syrup.

When mangoes are everywhere in the Indian summer, put them in your tea.

Mango is an Indian summer flavor we have come back to more than once. Our first iced tea range in 2015 drew on aam panna, the raw mango cooler found in Indian fridges every summer, and one of its 10 blends was built around it. The ripe fruit in this recipe gives a softer, sweeter glass than the tart raw mango.

Iced green tea with lime

For a plainer glass, our January 2020 recipe needs only green tea, lime, mint, ice and a sweetener of your choice. Steep the green tea, add the sweetener and lime wheels, let it cool in the fridge, then serve it over ice with mint. Use the double-strength rule from our main guide so the ice does not water it down.

Straight from the bazaars of Marrakesh: in Morocco, sweet mint tea is served to welcome guests and after every meal. It is traditionally drunk hot, but it makes a fine iced tea.

Mint and Darjeeling are an old pairing in our kitchen. Our blending notes say Darjeelings “make great iced teas and lend themselves well to the addition of sugar syrup and mint.”

Short of time? Green Tea Mint Digestion is a ready blend of green tea and mint. Or freeze it: our 2016 Moroccan mint granita boils 4 cups of water with 1 cup of loosely packed mint leaves, then steeps 1 tablespoon of Moroccan mint tea and ⅓ cup of honey in it for 2 minutes. Strain it into a metal tin, freeze for 4 to 5 hours, stirring every hour, and scrape it into crystals with a fork. Stirring every hour is what turns a block of ice into fluffy crystals.

Because ice dilutes it, start with more tea than for a hot cup. The full method, an iced chai latte and a quick version from concentrate are in Chai latte, hot or iced; for classic stovetop chai, see How to make masala chai at home.

Our summer iced chai

Our own iced chai was a happy accident. Meeta Sharma, who wrote for our blog, found it in 2015 when a hot cup of masala chai cooled in an air-conditioned room. Her Summer Iced Chai serves two.

1. Simmer the tea and spices. Bring 2 cups of water to a boil, add 2 teaspoons of Assam loose-leaf black tea, a ½-inch cinnamon stick, ½ inch of fresh ginger, 3 to 4 cardamom and ¼ teaspoon of fennel seeds, and simmer for about 4 minutes.
2. Sweeten while it is hot. Turn off the heat, let it cool, and stir in sugar or honey to taste, then pour it into a pitcher or flask.
3. Chill it well. Leave it in the fridge for at least 2 hours.
4. Serve over ice. Fill a glass with ice, pour in the chilled tea and top it with about 4 tablespoons of milk.

For a version without milk, she suggests lemon juice and mint, “or enjoy the chilled masala tea as it is.” Make it with a strong Assam such as our Classic Assam Black. The full recipe and the latte version are in Iced chai latte.

We nearly built our whole first iced range around chai. In 2015 the team “were leaning toward iced chais when someone (quite likely from Marketing) said, once again, ‘No, not chai!’,” and iced teas won.

Our iced tea mocktails

When we sold our own iced tea blends, we built a set of mocktails on 120 ml of strong, chilled tea concentrate and plenty of ice, most of them with about 20 ml of sugar syrup and 15 ml of lime juice. Then each glass got its own twist. Fruit punch tea was layered with strawberries, mint and lemon and topped with soda; the Mint Sparkle added 50 ml of cucumber juice to a mint tea. The same idea works with any strong iced tea from this guide.

The Pineapple Express of the same series topped its concentrate with a lemon-lime soda and pomegranate. In December 2020 we made a ginger tea mocktail from 120 ml of ginger tea concentrate, 80 ml of litchi juice, 5 ml of rose water and 15 ml of sugar syrup, and a fruit punch from a hibiscus concentrate.

How to make the concentrate

The concentrate for our fruit blends was simple. “Brew the tea for the duration mentioned on the packet and infuse for not more than 2 hours. Allow it to cool and strain before refrigerating overnight.” Those blends were mostly fruit, flowers and spice. With a straight black or green tea, strain the leaves at the usual time instead and double the leaf for strength, as in our main guide.

Chef Priya Vijan, who built cocktails and mocktails from our 2017 blends, kept her recipes to “very fetchable ingredients” and gave one rule: “balancing the sweet with sour is the key to get a perfect drink!”

For an evening version of the mango recipe, the Mango Green Tea Mojito on our blog muddles lime juice, mint and brown sugar in a tall glass, then tops it with ice, chilled green tea, mango juice and 45 ml of white rum. We have shared it twice, in 2016 and again in 2020 with Moroccan mint green tea as the base.

Priya Vijan’s Berry Blitz stirs 120 ml of a strawberry iced tea concentrate with 15 ml of gin, 30 ml of white wine, cucumber, chopped strawberries and halved green grapes, then infuses it overnight. Our 2017 series used the same 120 ml base for a Tropic Topic with 45 ml of whiskey, 15 ml of lime juice, 20 ml of sugar syrup and a splash of soda, and a Pomegranate Swirl with 45 ml of gin and 60 ml of tonic water.

For hot tea cocktails, see our 2014 story 4 easy, must-try cocktail recipes with tea.