This tea is great hot or iced, but personally, I believe this tea shines best as iced. After brewing and cooling the tea to room temperature, it blends well with any drink you could imagine! We make a few drinks with it, notably our Sage Lavender Lemonade, which adds lavender syrup and is topped off with lemonade. It could even be added to mocktail recipes or an afternoon fruit tea recipe to make any afternoon a special occasion! If you choose to have this tea hot, the tea pairs wonderfully with honey and a lemon wedge. The sweetness from the honey and the brightness from the lemon wedge would brighten up anyone’s day! 

Cold brew has taken the world by storm since its inception, and even in the USA it has increased by 300% from 2016 to 2023 according to Food & Beverage Insider! At Higher Ground, we started selling cold brew the same year that we opened in 2007, and in 2015 we moved the cold brew production to our Vantage Coffee Roastery in Union City. Around this same time we also began to serve nitro[genated] cold brew! Initially, cold brew wasn’t well known and we were only selling 2-3 gallons a week, but now we sell anywhere from 100-120 gallons a week between four separate stores. What may come as a surprise to some is that cold brew has actually been around since at least the 1600! It’s historically been associated with the Dutch and Kyoto, Japan known as Kyoto-style coffee, but is for sure founded in Kyoto as sort of the genesis of this style of coffee. Cold brew has been around for many centuries but really is a kind of recent phenomenon in terms of how the world has traditionally consumed coffee. So, the rise of cold brew over the last decade raises questions that many people want to know such as: What is cold brew? How is it made? Why is it suddenly so popular and on demand?