Tea Cocktail Recipe: Sage Advice

Happy new year, everybody! I hope you find the opportunity that is hidden in this crisis and reap the rewards. Given the lockdown situation and my love of tea, I present you with my tasty 2021 gift recipe for a tea cocktail. I developed it around the “how to stay healthy” idea, which is especially important during a pandemic.

Health Boosting Cocktails is a Thing

Tea based cocktails can be easily named as the healthiest cocktails. But there is alcohol in it! Hey, having a banana is healthy; try having 400 bananas at once, and you are dead. Nonetheless, they didn’t say “good ‘ol remedy for nothing”. Here is our second Covid cocktail recipe – Sage Advice. In case you missed the first one, here is a link to Rose Hip Thyme.

Sage Advice Cocktail Recipe

You’ll need just a few ingredients for this tea cocktail, even though it is a far cry from an easy one. After all, what makes the artisan cocktails different from the others? Homemade ingredients from the scratch, if you ask me. For the Sage advice, I used two preprepared ingredients, purple coneflower (Echinacea purpurea) liqueur, and young pine shoot syrup. I will describe later how to prepare each of these. As an alcohol base, I used Ki No Tea expression by the Kyoto Distillery. However, you can use any other London Dry gin. Tanqueray with its juniper straight and licorice will fit perfectly here. As you already know, this is a tea-based cocktail and I used strong sage tea. In addition to that, you need a spoon of good forest honey and organic lemon.

Ingredients

Young pine shoots syrup:

• 4 cups of fresh young pine shoots
• 2 cups of coconut sugar (if you have a chance to get Gula Melaka, you can try with it)

Purple coneflower liqueur:

• 4 cups of fresh Purple coneflower flowers and leaves
• 2 cups of sugar
• 3 cups of moonshine (try to get higher than 50% ABV)

Sage tea

• 5g of dried sage leaves (you can mix varieties. I like to add some lemon sage for zesty note)
• 100ml water

Sage Advice Cocktail:

• 30ml London Dry Gin (I used Ki No Tea by the Kyoto Distillery but some classics like Tanqueray will do as well)
• 20ml purple coneflower liqueur
• 30ml sage tea
• 1 teaspoon young pine shoots syrup
• 1 teaspoon forest honey
• lemon

Directions

Alright, let’s go to the directions on how to make this amazing tea cocktail. First thing first, there are two ingredients you should prepare in advance – young pine shoots syrup and purple coneflower liqueur. If you don’t have them, and you wanna make this cocktail straight away, check at your home remedy shop.

Young Pine Shoots Syrup

For homemade young pine shoots syrup, you should go and harvest them in mid-spring when they are like the name says it – young. Above all, make sure you don’t pick the one on the top of the pine tree. Needless to say, it brings bad luck to you and dwarfism to the tree. At home put a layer of the pine shoots in the glass jar and cover it with organic coconut sugar. We do encourage you to try Gula Melaka if you have a chance to get it. After that, repeat the layers until you finish with the sugar on the top. Seal the jar and leave it in the sun throughout the whole summer. In the autumn filter it, and you have your syrup. Sweet shoots you can use for desserts or cook them in tea.

Just like that, you got extremely delicious syrup that has a beneficial effect on the respiratory system and helps soothe caught.

Purple Coneflower Liqueur

Purple coneflowers are easy to cultivate. In the light of gardening, we can say you just burry some seeds into the ground and forget about it. In the late summer, you will enjoy the view of the happy bees and start picking them. Cut the flowers and some leaves in a way the young flowers will continue to grow. In like manner, you can pick them up through the whole summer till early autumn. At home prepare a huge container with strong alcohol (we used 65% ABV organic homemade moonshine) and sugar. Furthermore, store it in a dark place. Every time you pick new flowers and leaves soak them in the existing solution and leave them covered. After a few months filter it into the bottles and you have your home remedy.

Please be careful, purple coneflower is potent and should be used with cautions. For more read here. Special tip: dry some whole flowers which can be used as decoration or making a freshly brewed tea.

Tea Cocktail Recipe

Alright, now that you know how to make the syrup and coneflower liqueur, we can get straight to the tea cocktail. Boil very strong sage tea and leave it to cool down (you can leave the sage leaves in it and macerate it more if you please).

For the cocktail, stir London dry gin, coneflower liqueur, pine syrup, cold concentrated sage tea, and honey altogether. Add ice and stir, strain it to the glass, or even better – lovely porcelain cup. At the end squeeze a wedge of organic lemon and garnish with a slice. On the top of the slice put some fresh sage leaves or coneflower petals.

Thank you for your attention. I hope you will try out this delicious Covid Cocktail Recipe and get your spirits and immune system high. Check us from time to time for new healthy cocktails and wait for our cocktail recipe book.