Cold-brew mint green tea
Green tea without the bitterness. The trick is never heating it.
Almost everyone who says they dislike green tea has only had it brewed badly — scalded with boiling water, which strips out tannins and makes it bitter and drying.
Cold brewing skips that entirely. Nothing is hot enough to extract the harsh compounds, so what you get is sweeter, rounder, and noticeably lower in caffeine. It also takes no attention: put it in the fridge, forget it, drink it tomorrow.
How to make it
- Hands on
- 3 min
- Total
- 8 h 3 min
- Makes
- 4 servings
- Per glass
- 0 kcal
Ingredients
Method
-
Combine cold
Tea, mint and cold water straight into a jug. Do not warm anything — the entire method is that nothing gets hot.
-
Refrigerate overnight
Eight hours minimum. Unlike hot tea, this will not turn bitter if you leave it longer, so overnight is safe.
-
Remove the tea, keep the mint
Take the bags or leaves out before serving. The mint can stay in the jug all day without any harm.
-
Serve over ice
It keeps for three days in the fridge.
Worth knowing
- Loose-leaf beats bags noticeably here, because cold water extracts slowly and leaf quality shows.
- Do not squeeze the teabags. That is where the bitterness you avoided is hiding.
What it actually does for you
- Calories
- 0 kcal
Zero calories and, despite decades of folklore, no meaningful dehydrating effect. The caffeine in tea is a very mild diuretic and it does not come close to offsetting the water you drink with it — cold brewing roughly halves it anyway, to around 20 to 25 mg a glass. This counts fully toward your daily fluid.
How this was worked out: Brewed green tea with no additions contains no measurable calories. Cold-water extraction pulls out substantially less caffeine than hot brewing; hot-brewed green tea runs about 30 to 50 mg per cup, cold brew closer to 20 to 25 mg.
Variations
- Add a strip of lemon peel for the last hour.
- Swap in jasmine green tea, which cold-brews particularly well.
- Use half the water for a concentrate, then dilute to taste.
Making it is the easy part
Remembering to drink it is the hard part. Honk watches your webcam with on-device AI and honks until you do, as gently or as loudly as you like.
Meet Honk → join the waitlistQuestions
Does green tea dehydrate you?
No. This is one of the most persistent pieces of nutrition folklore. Caffeine has a mild diuretic effect at high doses, but the fluid in the drink far outweighs it — studies comparing tea with water find no difference in hydration status. Your tea counts toward your daily total.
How much caffeine is in cold-brew green tea?
Roughly 20 to 25 mg a glass, against 30 to 50 mg for the same tea brewed hot, because cold water extracts caffeine far less efficiently. For comparison, a filter coffee is around 95 mg. It is mild enough for most people to drink in the afternoon.
Can you reuse the leaves?
For a second cold brew, yes, though it will be much lighter. Add fresh mint if you do — the mint gives up its flavour faster than the tea does.
