Harvest Spice Apple-tea-ni

This recipe is a great reason to be happy that another beautiful fall weekend has arrived.

The recipe features Harvest Spice Tea from The Tea Spot that I steeped in aged rum and then mixed into the perfect fall cocktail. Harvest Spice is a black tea blend that is pretty potently flavored with orange, cinnamon and clove, so it creates a great flavoring agent to create your own spiced rum. The Harvest Spice Tea came to me as a free sample in a recent Tea Spot order I placed, and now I’m hooked. I’ll definitely order more, because this is my new favorite rum cocktail.

This summer, I had the pleasure of sitting down for a cup of tea with Boulder, Colo., based The Tea Spot’s founder and CEO, Maria Uspenski. Her company’s mission is pretty amazing: Ten percent of all of The Tea Spot’s profits are donated to cancer wellness and community programs. (I recently wrote about this in a Denver Tea Examiner article about The Tea Spot’s Steep it Pink promotion.) During our tea chat, I was pleasantly surprised to find out that Maria and I share a thing for tea-infused cocktails. So this recipe is for her.

Happy cooking and sipping!

 By Suzanne Klein, Tea Foodie

Makes 2 cups of tea-infused rum and 2 cocktails

Ingredients:

For the tea-infused rum:

2 heaping teaspoons loose leaf Harvest Spice Tea from The Tea Spot (or other spice-infused black tea blend)

2 cups aged dark rum

For the cocktail:

4 ounces tea-infused rum

4 ounces unfiltered apple juice or apple cider (I used Ginger Apple from local Colorado brand Big B’s )

crushed ice, enough to fill two highball glasses

splash of sparkling water

2 thin apple slices

dash of ground cinnamon

Preparation:

1. Prepare the tea infused rum: Steep the loose leaf tea in the dark rum in a sealed glass container for at least 4 hours. Strain, discard the tea leaves, and store the tea-infused rum in a tightly sealed container.

2. Mix the cocktail: Combine the tea-infused rum and apple juice in a cocktail shaker. Pour the mixture over the crushed ice divided into two highball glasses. Top each glass with sparkling water, a slice of apple, and a dash of ground cinnamon, and serve.