Are you ready for some warmer weather? February is my least favorite month, and the grey skies and cold temps have me pining away for a little sunshine! If you are looking for a little artificial sunshine in your life, you can try this delicious cocktail. Iced tea and lemonade always remind me of summertime, even in the dead of Winter, so this cocktail is a nice escape from the reality of the season.
A traditional Arnold Palmer is a non-alcoholic drink that is a mixture of iced tea and lemonade in equal proportions. To turn this into a cocktail, I decided to use Lipton’s premixed Half & Half tea and lemonade and some home-infused gin. If you aren’t a gin fan, you can infuse vodka with this same process.
Before we get started, I need to put on my mom face and remind you not to mess with this recipe at all if you aren’t of legal drinking age because it’s against the law. And don’t drink and drive because it’s stupid and dangerous. And don’t tipple and text because old boyfriends.
With that out of the way, let’s get started. Infusing alcohol with tea is shockingly easy. I began by pouring a few ounces of decent (not great, not horrible) gin into a clean mason jar. I added in a few bags of black tea and screwed the jar lid back on. Two hours later I had tea-infused gin.
(If you want to see a 6 second time lapse of the process, add me on Vine. My username is Madincrafts.)
You can use either bagged tea or loose tea, you will just have to strain the alcohol carefully if you use loose leaf tea. Feel free to use your favorite tea variety in place of the black tea.
Once you have the infused gin made, it’s time to turn this into a cocktail.
Begin by pouring one ounce of gin into a mixing glass.
Add 4 ounces of Lipton’s Half & Half.
Stir and pour into a chilled martini glass. Garnish with a twist of lemon. You could also serve this cocktail over ice in a Tom Collins glass .
Be careful with this drink, as the gin infusion is very hard to taste in the mixture.
I think this would be a great drink to sip in the summer around the pool or around a campfire. I love to have my girlfriends (and occasionally their husbands) over for fires in the summer. We keep the campfires happening as late into the year as possible, but February is too much of a stretch. If we had a brand new entertainment room, I could invite them all over for girls’ nights, even in the bitter winter! If I win the Game On Sweepstakes, I could do just that!
Everyone loves a girls’ night in and 2013 is my year to mix it up! Whether I am sharing unique, new recipes with friends, finding new ways to entertain or fun ways to stay active, I can’t wait to have more girls’ nights this year.
Lipton Iced Tea and Dance Central 3 have teamed together to host the ‘Game On’ sweepstakes so you too can take your next girl’s night in to the next level. Enter to win one of four ultimate entertainment room makeovers which include a new Samsung TV, sound system, Xbox 360 Kinect bundle and console, Dance Central 3 and more! Find out how here.
This is a sponsored conversation written by me on behalf of Lipton Iced Tea. The opinions and text are all mine.
