The Perfect Iced Tea for Canada Day: Refreshing Himalayan Tea Recipes
The Iced Tea Your Canada Day Has Been Missing
No bitterness. No sugar needed. Just high-altitude Himalayan tea, cold brewed overnight and poured over ice.
Most iced tea is an act of compromise. You brew it too strong and it turns bitter. You add sugar to fix the bitterness. You add lemon to balance the sugar. By the time it's drinkable, you've spent five minutes fixing a problem that shouldn't exist.
This Canada Day, there's a better option, and it comes from somewhere you might not expect: the high-altitude tea farms of Nepal, at 5,000 to 7,000 ft in the Himalayas, where thin mountain air and cool nights produce a leaf with no bitterness to begin with.
We're Nepal Hills Tea, and we're based right here in Peterborough, Ontario. Here's why Himalayan tea makes the best iced tea you'll drink all summer, and how to make it.
Why Most Iced Tea Tastes Bitter (And How Altitude Fixes It)
Bitterness in tea comes from tannins, compounds that occur naturally in the tea leaf. Most commercial teas are grown at low altitudes where the plant grows fast, the leaf is large, and tannins accumulate in high concentrations. Steep that tea for too long, or brew it wrong, and the bitterness overwhelms everything else.
High altitude changes that completely. At 5,000 to 7,000 ft in Nepal's Ilam and Taplejung districts, tea plants grow slowly. The cool nights, thin air, and mist create leaves that are dense with aromatic compounds and naturally lower in tannins. The result is a cup that's smooth and sweet from the first sip, hot or iced, with or without sugar.
When you cold brew a low-tannin tea overnight, the slow extraction draws out the fruit notes, the floral sweetness, and the natural caramel and honey depth without any harsh edge. You end up with an iced tea that tastes as if the leaf was meant to be drunk this way.
The 8-Hour Cold Brew: Your Canada Day Ritual
Set this up the night before July 1st and wake up to the best thing in your fridge.
How to Cold Brew Nepal Hills Tea
- Choose your tea. Dark Oolong, Gold Black, or Ruby Black Tea are the top picks for cold brew. All three have natural sweetness that intensifies cold.
- Measure. 1.5 teaspoons of loose leaf tea per 500 ml of cold water. No need to be precise; this tea is forgiving.
- Add cold water. Room temperature or straight from the tap. No hot water needed.
- Seal and refrigerate. 8 to 12 hours. Overnight is ideal.
- Strain and pour over ice. A fine mesh strainer or a French press works perfectly.
- Taste before adding anything. You'll likely drink it exactly as it is.
Dark Oolong cold brewed tastes of stone fruit: apricot, peach, and a little honey. Gold Black Tea goes caramel and malty, like a dessert you didn't need sugar to make. Ruby Black Tea cold brews into something close to a tart cherry drink: deep and smooth, with a beautiful colour in the glass.
All three are grown on certified organic farms, none of them are bitter, and any of them could change how you think about iced tea for the rest of the summer.
Where This Tea Comes From
Nepal Hills sources from four small farms in Nepal. None of them are large operations, and all of them do remarkable things with the land they farm.
150 farming families, led by Dil Kumar Rai. Certified organic. Source of our Gold Black, white teas, and green teas.
Jasbirey Village community. Certified organic. Home of our Ruby Black and Dark Oolong.
40 smallholder families, in the process of organic certification. Home of our Muscatel Black and Floral Oolong.
The highest farm in our range. Conventionally farmed. Source of Theba Black, which is rare, complex, and unlike anything else.
5% of every Nepal Hills purchase goes directly to the farming families through our Farmer Fund, and it's built into how we price every product. When you buy our Tea Sampler Kit, you're funding the farmers who made what's in it.
A Canadian Summer With a Himalayan Cup
Canada Day celebrates what makes this country worth living in, and for many of us, part of that is the freedom to discover great things from every corner of the world and make them our own. A Nepali tea grown by a family high in the Himalayas, cold brewed overnight in a Peterborough kitchen, and poured over ice in a Toronto backyard on July 1st feels distinctly Canadian to us.
No compromises and no bitterness, just something really good in your glass.
Start with the Tea Sampler Kit
10 teas from 4 farms, covering all four types: black, green, oolong, and white. It's everything you need to find your cold brew favourite before Canada Day.
Get the Tea Sampler Kit: $30 CADFree shipping on orders over $60 CAD · Ships from Peterborough, Ontario
