It’s been more than a year since I last inundated you all with photos of glasses of iced tea! Did you miss it? I did.

I spent a summer while I was in college working for Tealuxe in Boston. I made a lot of iced tea in mass quantities.* I’d scoop the tea leaves into long paper envelopes about the size of postcards, staple them together, drop them into a big metal double-walled drum with a spigot at the bottom, fill it halfway with boiling water, and then set a timer for it to steep. When the timer went off, I’d fill the rest of the drum with ice.** The key was that you made the tea twice as strong and steeped it twice as long as you would for hot tea. The other key was that you tried to avoid accidentally spilling the drum of boiling water on yourself and necessitating a trip to the emergency room.

This is a process that’s pretty easy to translate to home-cooking quantities, and there’s quite a bit less risk of really painful burns. I have a six-cup teapot and a more than 12-cup glass pitcher. You do not want to pour boiling water that you will then quickly cool into a glass pitcher (unless you want the glass to shatter all over, as it did frequently when someone new decided that they could pour iced tea into glasses still hot from the dishwasher). And I want more than six cups of iced tea. However, you can make the twice-as-strong, twice-as-long tea in the teapot, cool it a little, and then pour it into the pitcher to cool it the rest of the way. I would recommend this also if you only have a plastic pitcher, since there’s something about pouring boiling water into plastic that makes me uncomfortable.

Pour boiling water over 7 or 8 teabags of black tea (I used half decaf English Breakfast and half regular English Breakfast) in a six cup teapot. Cover and set a timer for seven or so minutes (black tea would normally steep for 3 - 5 minutes). Remove tea bags and stir in anywhere from 1 tablespoon to 1/4 cup of honey (I generally use about 2 tablespoons). Add a handful of ice. Stir to dissolve. Pour some of the tea carefully into your larger pitcher, add more ice to the remaining tea in the teapot, stir, and pour the remaining tea into the pitcher. Add at least one full tray of ice to the pitcher, possibly more. If you have it, crumple up a sprig of mint and toss it in.

It’s good for a few days in the fridge.

Here’s a picture from my office so you can see exactly how messy things have gotten in the past year.

* I also mastered a facial expression that communicated 80% “I am a pleasant and accommodating food service professional that values you as a customer and fellow human being” and 20% withering disdain.

** If you go into a tea shop, and instead of having a selection of two to four iced tea varieties available, they tell you that they can “make iced tea from any of their teas!” that means you’re going to be waiting basically forever for your iced tea. If there’s a line, and you ask them to make you some custom iced tea, you will probably get a look that’s at least 40% withering disdain.