If you like your tea to have a little bit of a kick, you’re in luck. There are many varieties of alcoholic beverages these days that are flavored with tea. One of the more popular of these categories lately seems to be vodka. Perhaps it’s because vodka is a clear, relatively flavorless liquid that distillers are so keen to blend it with the relatively subtle flavors of tea.

It’s hard to say for sure who pioneered the notion of tea-flavored vodka, but the Napa Valley-based Charbay Winery and Distillery lays claim to the first green tea vodka produced in the United States. The company claims that Charbay Green Tea Vodka took five years to create and derives its tea goodness from “rare first-growth green tea from the Anhwei Province, a prime growing region along China’s fabled Silk Route.” If you’d like to try out some of Charbay’s recipes for green tea vodka cocktails, look here.

From green tea vodka to sweet green tea vodka is presumably just a short step and it’s a step that the Phillips Distilling Company took in 2010, when they introduced UV Sweet Green Tea Vodka. Number twelve in the UV Vodka family of flavored vodkas, the green tea variety is said to blend “the Zen-like qualities of green teas with a modern sweet tea twist.”

If you like your sweet tea to be a little more traditional – that is, made from black tea and sugar – then you shouldn’t have any problem finding a sweet tea vodka to suit your tastes. Here’s a recent article from Fox News that takes a look at four sweet tea vodkas made by smaller distillers. It’s a market that’s getting rather crowded nowadays, given that there are also sweet tea vodka products made by larger spirit companies like Jeremiah Weed, Sweet Carolina, Seagrams, and Firefly.

In any event, if you’re looking for a tea-flavored vodka, you’ll have no shortage of choices nowadays. And, as always, be sure to remember to drink your tea-flavored vodka responsibly.

See also:
More Offbeat Teas
Offbeat Tea Drinks
Tea, Meet Beer
Tea, Meet Coffee 

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