Cuppa cocktails: Spike your drink for a different cup of tea

A headline in the London Evening Standard last year proclaimed that the English capital was being "gripped by tea cocktails". New York bars, too, have apparently been gripped, with bartenders corralling hot, cold, black, green and herbal teas into their repertoires, infusing booze, concocting syrups, exploring the possibilities of punch and excitedly spruiking tea as the latest It ingredient.

Australia, though, still seems to be waiting to get a grip.

Initial images of bourbon-spiking your morning cuppa aside, it's a little odd we're not more tea friendly in our cocktail making. Sure, coffee may have nudged ahead of tea in recent years as our hot beverage of choice but tea drinking, though not as intrinsically linked to national character as in England, has hardly gone underground.

Perhaps it's the fact that, unlike the Americans, we've never been wholly convinced by iced tea. Despite the heat we seem to prefer it hot. But surely, mixed with booze, we can try to put aside our prejudices. There are good reasons to.

For starters, there are the thirst-quenching, rehydrating qualities of tea. This comes into play in drinks in which tea is used to lengthen a drink in lieu of soft drink, fruit juice or water.

Tea has been used in this fashion for centuries, mainly black tea and mainly in punch. It adds a lovely background of slightly smoky bitterness, perfect in drinks like the classic Fish House Punch where the rum, cognac and peach liqueur base seems to become more reasonable, more adult, more complex with tea (as opposed to the traditional water) in the mix. The one proviso here is to keep an eye on how long the leaves steep as too-strong black tea can overwhelm the punch with bitterness and ruin the party for everybody.

But rehydrating qualities aside (and let's not even get into the "wellness" claims some are attaching to tea in cocktails, as if they're actually drinking the things to lower their cholesterol and prevent heart disease), it's really the broad, diverse flavour profile of tea – tannic, smoky, floral, nutty, grassy, citrus – that's getting cocktail makers all hot and bothered.

Then there's the diverse ways tea can be put to use.

Smoky lapsang souchong is used to wash barrels that are then filled with whiskey. Japanese bartenders like to serve bourbon and chilled matcha in a tall glass with lots of ice. Jasmine tea can be successfully mixed with gin, hibiscus tea with Aperol and green tea with tequila. In tea-cocktail-gripped London, one of the favourite concoctions is Earl Grey tea, London dry gin, a little sugar and a squeeze of lemon served over ice.

There's also the infusing side of the equation. Infusing spirits with tea is remarkably quick and easy, as spirits with a 40-50 per cent alcohol by volume content act upon tea with a similar efficacy to boiling water.

Hideously punned name aside, the Earl Grey Marteani is one of the best ways to see how well tea and booze play together. Put four heaped tablespoons of Earl Grey in a bottle of gin two hours before you need to mix the drinks. Then mix two parts (strained) gin with one part lemon juice, one part sugar syrup (1:1 sugar-to-water ratio) and an egg white in a cocktail shaker, shake it with ice andstrain it into a chilled, sugar-rimmed martini glass.

Another easy tea cocktail, sometimes known as a Green Iced Tea, involves infusing blanco tequila with a ginger-and-lemon tea bag for about 30 minutes,then combining the tequila with cucumber juice and a splash of lemon juice and serving it over ice. It's a perfect remedy to a long, hot summer day and a pretty good argument for jumping on the bandwagon and getting gripped by the refreshing allure of tea and booze.