# Chai Tea Mead...A question



## BernardSmith (Jan 20, 2016)

I see that a number of members on this forum have successfully made tea wines. I am planning on making a mead using chai spices and tea. My question: To make regular tea you might steep the tea in near boiling water for about 5 minutes. When you make wine do you want to steep the tea longer or do you want to use more tea than you would to make the same volume. In other words, If 16 bags would normally make 16 cups and if 16 cups makes one gallon) and if each bag was steeped for 5 minutes then to make a gallon of wine do I want to use 16 bags or more? and do I want to steep those bags for 5 minutes or longer? Thoughts? Thanks.


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## RedRockGirl (Jan 20, 2016)

I'd love to learn about this too. My favorite tea is Bigelow Vanilla Chai Tea. Could wine be made from it?


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## Whitehrs (Jun 19, 2016)

A subject I have a little experience with, tea and coffee, finally. But I had been thinking the same thing marry JAOM with Chia tea, A couple things I would do different next time on the JAOM. I would drop the Original Specific Gravity a bit, and work on a Spices, this is where the Chia tea comes in. The original SG: 1.115, and a very violent fermentation time of 5 days, and 5 days of no activity ending in an FG: of 1.005, gave me abv of about 14% using Fleschman's Active dry yeast. It was very hot. I figure an OG: 1.080 and FG: 1.000 would give me about 10% and would be very good. 

My question would be would you brew the tea strong and use as the water in the brew, or would you use the bags as the spice leaving them in during the aging process?

BTW, Bigelow is very good tasting for the price.. That would probably be my choice for the Mead.


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