Love Tea, Tender

Posted in Little Urn.

Jayson from Bourbon & Branch getting ready to make some tea cocktails

This weekend Little Urn hit the hills of San Francisco as Caz and Chris prepared to throw our 2nd flash brew, serving up free cups of Yorkshire Tea to homesick Brits, just a stone’s throw from the magnificent Golden Gate Bridge.

But before we did that we had an idea: what if Little Urn were to pay one of the city coolest bars a visit – could we get one of their cocktail mixing masters to try their hand at making us a Yorkshire Tea cocktail?

That’s how Caz and Chris came to be standing at the bar with Jayson Wilde, bar manager at Bourbon & Branch. With its softly lit booths, dark flock wallpaper and thick wooden shelves laden with bottles, the place feels like it’s hardly changed since the days of Prohibition, when it successfully traded as a ‘speak-easy’. So it wasn’t difficult to get into the spirit (so to speak).

As well as mixing a number of his own Yorkshire Tea cocktails, we also gave Jayson a list of recipes sent in by our followers on Facebook and Twitter. From Sharon Webster’s ‘Tea-quila Sunrise’ to Russell Newlove’s ‘Boozy Chai’, Jayson said there were a lot of great ideas to play with, but the one that really caught his eye was Katy Dimech’s suggestion.

Improvising slightly, Jayson took Katy’s recipe of tea, orange blossom, gin and champagne, and set to work. First he prepared a strong brew of Yorkshire Tea, then he added sugar and brought it back to the boil to make a concentrated tea syrup. Next, after swapping some aromatic orange bitters for the orange blossom, he mixed in some premium gin and topped it off with a little bubbly. Not only was the finished result delicious, but Jayson even gave it a great name - the ‘Yorkshire Blossom’. We’re just sorry you couldn’t be there to have a taste, Katy!

If you’d like to see more of Caz and Chris’s tea cocktail experiments with Jayson, look out for the short film we’ll be releasing on our Facebook page soon.

What Jayson thought of your tea cocktail recipes

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