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Tea gone cool

Tea is an integral part of our lives. We start the day with a hot cup of chai. If you catch a cold, you drink tea specially prepared with healing spices like cardamom, basil leaves, cloves and ginger. And if you are tired after a hard day’s work, a cup of tea is your solace.

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Tea is an integral part of our lives. We start the day with a hot cup of chai. If you catch a cold, you drink tea specially prepared with healing spices like cardamom, basil leaves, cloves and ginger. And if you are tired after a hard day’s work, a cup of tea is your solace.

But can you imagine sipping tea that’s served cold? Or imagine if your tea came mixed with chocolate sauce. It’s an odd thought, but that’s exactly what you will be served at Tea Trove, a Kolkata-based outlet. “Cold tea is a relief in Kolkata’s humid weather,” said Rishab Kanoi, who started Tea Trove.

Since I was with my siblings, I tasted four different varieties of cold tea. The Creamy Dream was a combination of cream and teapresso and turned out to be more like a tea shake. It was refreshing and light though a little too sweet for my taste.  Any ingredient mixed with coffee cannot overpower its taste, but with tea the flavour has to be maintained by mixing the add-ons in small portions. The Mocha Teachilo, for instance, has a subtle hint of chocolate.

The flavourings added to Tea Trove’s cold teas are light but do enough to differentiate one drink from the other. If one tea has cream, another is brewed with milk powder or condensed milk. Ice cream, chocolate and caramel are other add-ons that lend the tea its distinct flavours.

Coming from a family that owns tea gardens, Rishab Kanoi is passionate about tea, which led him to experiment with various kinds of tea leaves — green as well as CTC — from Assam and Darjeeling. While coffee readily goes with a range of flavourings — especially chocolate — tea pairs well with spices such as cardamom. Kanoi, however, doesn’t add any spices to his cold teas.

So we talk of how he balanced tea with chocolate, an unheard of combination. “The amount of chocolate that is added to tea is definitely far lesser than what is added to mocha. But if you find the right balance, chocolate can be delicious with tea,” said Kanoi. However, the experiments weren’t without failures. Cold tea flavoured with hazelnut, for instance, received a tepid response from customers.

The Antartican, a simple combination of tea and ice, on the other hand, has done very well. “We like to keep it simple,” says Shruti Kanoi, Rishab’s wife, “There’s no use serving 300 varieties of tea if your customer’s taste buds don’t appreciate it. People unaccustomed to Kashmiri and Japanese tea can’t possibly savour it. We have customers staying put with the cold chai. That says it all.”


 

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