Tea is our ingredient of the season this winter. Looking for another cocktail with tea? Check out our Garden Gin. And want to experiment with more infused vodkas? We love this hazelnut liqueur and this rosemary vodka.

Today we’re here to provide a warning : tea-infused vodka may be an acquired taste… and we haven’t quite acquired it yet, but we’re trying (I’m drinking some as I type!). On a scale of 1 to 10, we’re giving this one an “ehh”.

So, the idea is simple, take some vodka, add some tea, let it sit, then strain, and then make a cocktail. But for how simple it is, and for how much we love tea and vodka, somehow we aren’t loving the results. And this isn’t some crazy idea schemed up by us, Absolut sells a tea-flavored vodka!

We infused vodka with Earl Grey tea and then used it to make a modified Moscow mule. It took just one sip to admit that the regular is mule much better.

Making the Tea-infused Vodka

I’ve seen a variety of recommendations in terms of both tea quantity and time for your infusion. I put two teabags in 1 cup of vodka and let it sit for 6 hours. You will see your vodka change color immediately, but you want to keep the teabags in for more time to let the vodka take on the tea flavor (or maybe you don’t? joking. or not?).

Making the Mule

Have you made one yet? Get on it!

Mix together two parts ginger ale to one part vodka of your choice (steer away from the tea-infused if you know what’s good for you! seriously, but kind of joking). Add a good squeeze of fresh lime juice, serve it over ice, and enjoy!

Not loving my first batch, I decided to try again with another brand of Earl Grey and we tested two different brands of ginger ale… what did you think we were going to throw in the towel that quickly? Any experiment that requires sampling cocktails is always worth my time.

As would be expected, the tea adds its flavor as well as a bitterness to the vodka. When those flavors are added to the ginger ale, they start to overtake the warm flavor of the ginger ale. Maybe it’s the alcohol talking, but I can definitely down a tea-infused Moscow Mule; I just don’t LOVE it. As a result, I think it’s the type of thing that I would try once if I saw it on a bar menu, but wouldn’t go out of my way to make again at home.

My problem is that I can’t think of any other cocktail that I want to make with the tea-infused vodka, and that’s really what’s causing me to think that this infusion is a dud.

I thought about holding on to this post and experimenting even further with both different teas for the infusion and different cocktails varieties, but decided that it would be worthwhile to publish our current results and maybe hear from readers. Have you experimented with tea-infused vodka? Have you sampled it in a cocktail that you loved? We need ideas!