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Buzzing All Night Long

This is my "to be continued" blog post.  Okay.  SO, last night I spoke of a tea/coffee concoction.  My friend Andrew has decided to name it Cofftea.  I think that works.

Now, I've experimented with several coffee and tea mixes.  I've learned some DOs and DON'Ts.  Obviously, using Earl Grey tea with coffee isn't a good idea.  The citrus flavor just... It doesn't work.  Trust me.

Actually, let me back up.  So the idea in the first place came about because I tried making some tea in the coffee maker.  I was Googling that... and I found that some people cut coffee with black tea to try and take down the caffeine content.

I found that to be interesting.  Meanwhile, my tea in the coffee maker actually comes out pretty well.  The key is to run some water though it between coffee and tea.

I tried black tea, green tea, some herbal teas.  Not together, just in different batches.  I drank some hot, and some I iced.

The reason actually for the tea in the coffee maker was that I bought some loose lipton tea in bulk and was going to make iced tea... I wanted to see if I could quickly make a lot of iced tea.

That answer is yes.  You can take the bulk lipton just plain cheap black tea and then double the quantity of black tea leaves for whatever amount of water you are going to brew.  This is a 12 cup that I have.  So  I could just fill up the coffee maker with tea leaves, brew a good amount, then let it cool down and then I have fresh home made iced tea.

Okay, back to my previous thing... So after some brewing and experimenting, I decided that a better way to do this would be to combine half iced coffee, and half iced tea, and not to brew them together.

Now, I start searching around online, and find that some people order that drink from Starbucks, half iced coffee cold brew and half iced tea.

I THOUGHT about going to Starbucks to order this, but decided instead I could try and just buy some cold brew, and some tea... and combine them.

So, I'm at the store and looking at options and I find this one drink that is a tea based drink.  I then decided, what if I combined it with the cold brew that I like from another store.

I decided to combine the two, and it's pretty good.  What are the two drinks you ask?  Well, I actually combined 3 because I added some milk to it as well, but you can not do that, or you can add creamer instead of something...

Here are the two that I found that work well...

Whole Foods sells an in-store individually brewed 16 ounce cold brew.  It's super strong.  If you can't find it, there's various other cold brew 16 or 32 ounce bottles in most stores.  Just use the one that is without anything else added... Just cold brew coffee.  You can also make it yourself if you do that often.

Next up... I happened upon this drink from Odwalla the other night...

http://www.odwalla.com/products/proteins/chai-vanilla-protein

That's a chai black tea.

I combined the cold brew from Whole Foods with that drink, and a little bit of some milk...

It's REALLY good!

Obviously that drink is a protein drink, so you can just substitute it for any kind of ready made chai tea that you can find in the store if you're not into having that protein part.

Seriously though, feel free to experiment, but chai tea combined with cold brew coffee?

It's dangerous stuff because I drank it down SUPER fast.  And you get MEGA amounts of caffeine obviously because you've got the coffee, and the tea...

It will seriously keep you up ALL night long.

Trust me.

I think I'm going to experiment combining different cold brews with difference iced chai teas.  I might even head to Starbucks at some point in the near future and order a half cold brew and half iced chai "cofftea" and see what they say.

But, even if you go with JUST the Whole Foods ready made cold brew 16 ounce in store brew and the Odwalla Chai Vanilla protein drink... That alone is pretty tasty...

I guess it works for me because there's extra protein in it for my new weights thing, not that I'm really doing enough weights at the gym to warrant drinking a protein drink on the regular, but apparently protein is what you want when you do weight stuff.

And, of course, the caffeine keeps me buzzing all night long.

I think I want to try a chai though that doesn't have the protein thing just because I'm really not trying to bulk up and become some body builder weight lifter person.

But anyways, so if you want to try half coffee, and half tea... I recommend cold brew mixed with iced chai tea.