How to Make Sun Tea, Summer’s Most Refreshing Drink

If you love iced tea but don’t want to heat up your kitchen by making it, you need to know how to make sun tea. You can harness the energy of the sun to your advantage, using its power and heat to slowly infuse tea bags into water. As a result of its slow, gentle brewing method, sun tea has a more subtle flavor than regular iced tea. It’s a simple, refreshing drink that will help you cool down on a long, hot summer day.

What Makes Sun Tea Different

There’s nothing complicated about making iced tea, but sun tea simplifies the process even further. The most obvious difference between sun tea and more traditionally brewed tea is that you don’t use boiling water. In fact, you do almost nothing. To make sun tea, all you do is place tea bags in a pitcher full of water and wait a few hours—the sun takes care of everything else. 

The only thing that you need to pay attention to is the outside temperature. The hotter it is outside, the faster the sun tea will brew. So, if it’s a particularly scorching day, you might want to check on the tea after two hours or so. 

Overall, sun tea has a more mild, delicate, and less bitter flavor compared to hot-brewed tea. This is because sun tea brews over several hours, so the tea leaves are able to release their flavors much more slowly.

What You'll Need

To make sun tea, you only need two ingredients (including water!), a container to hold the tea, and the sun. 

• Tea bags: We prefer to use tea bags here rather than loose-leaf tea, it's easier and less messy. You’ll need 2 tea bags for every quart (four cups) of water used. Black tea is used most often since it is the type of tea most people are familiar with. You can use your favorite white, green, or herbal tea instead, but it may require some experimentation in terms of how many tea bags you need to use to get the flavor just right. 
• Water: You don’t need to do anything to the water to make sun tea. The sunlight will slowly warm up the water to infuse the tea bags, so there’s no need to boil the water. 
• Pitcher: Always use a glass container when making sun tea. You don’t want to put a plastic container out into the sun since it may cause chemicals to leach into the tea and change the overall flavor. 
• Direct sunlight: The power of the sun is the most important ingredient in sun tea.