Sips // Mango Green Tea Sparkler

Sunday was National Iced Tea Day, and as tea is one of my favorite things on the planet, this precipitated another celebratory sip. Yes, I will celebrate anything – that’s part of what makes life fun, isn’t it? In any case, I turned to my Homemade Soda cookbook – an impulse buy with a gift card when Border’s was having it’s closing sales. One of life’s better decisions. I found a recipe for an effervescent raspberry white tea and decided to tweak the basic formula to suit my current mood. Which happened to involve green tea (my favorite iced tea variety) and mangoes (husband’s favorite fruit) and more ginger ale.

Here’s what you’ll need (makes 3-4 drinks):

Combine the water and sugar in a pan, bring to a boil and remove from heat. Add tea bags and mango and steep for 5 minutes.

Remove the tea bags and mash up the mangoes – let the mixture cool to room temperature then strain it (you can make this syrup in advance and keep in the fridge.)

Pour mixture into glasses and top with ginger ale – or you could just use seltzer water as the book suggests.

I will note that the syrup is super sweet and pretty mango-y. Cory loved that and he also preferred it with club soda to ginger ale so that the mango flavor was more in the forefront. I liked the ginger flavor, but probably would have used less syrup in mine compared to soda as it was almost TOO sweet for me. Actually, if you’re going to mix with a ginger ale or another sweetened soda (as opposed to club soda or seltzer), I’d probably reduce the sugar to 1/2 cup or maybe even less. Feel free to tweak to your own taste and come up with your own combinations!

I love basic template recipes that can be modified in all sorts of ways – this one is a great example. Other delicious combinations would be black tea + raspberry or jasmine tea + peach! Or instead of seltzer or ginger ale you could use a citrus soda. The possibilities are endless.

Who knew iced tea could be so fancy?