Tea mocktails for the holiday table: six from our catalog

A tea mocktail is a strong tea base, something sweet, something sour and, at the last minute, bubbles. For a holiday table, the practical version is three pitchers made the day before from teas in our catalog, two of them caffeine-free so they can sit at the children's end and carry the late evening, plus a couple of single-glass mocktails built on a syrup you make once. This piece picks six from our recipe pages, gives the brewing numbers behind each one, scales them for 8 to 12 guests and lays out what to make the night before.

The formula: one base, four parts

Every drink below is the same four parts in different clothes. The base is tea brewed stronger than you would drink it hot, usually as a cold brew: 8 to 16 g of leaf per liter of cold water for 8 to 12 hours in the refrigerator, with the band for each family in our cold brew guide. The sweet part is sugar, honey or a flavored syrup. The sour part is lime or lemon, and it is what keeps a sweet tea from reading as dessert. The bubbles are soda water, added in the glass. Cold brewing matters more here than for an ordinary iced tea: a base that will be diluted by ice and soda has to start smooth and strong, and cold water gives strength without the tannic edge of a hot brew left to cool.

Six from our catalog, by moment of the evening

For the first glass, when people arrive: sparkling Darjeeling peach iced tea. Three tea bags in two cups of cold water for 8 to 12 hours, a sliced peach muddled in the glass, honey if you want it, and sparkling water on top. The recipe is written for summer peaches; in December a ripe pear or a tinned peach does the same job. Darjeeling is a level 3 on our caffeine scale, brewed hot at 194°F (90°C) for 3 minutes with 2.5 g per cup, so this is the arrival glass, not the late one.

The pitcher that does the decorating is Agua de Jamaica: a cup of dried hibiscus flowers steeped 15 minutes in three cups of just-boiled water, half a cup of sugar stirred in while warm, three cups of cold water and two tablespoons of lime juice, chilled for at least two hours. It makes four tall glasses, pours a deep ruby red and tastes a little like cranberry, which is why it belongs in December. Hibiscus is level 0. Our catalog brews it hot at 203°F (95°C) for 5 minutes with 2 g per cup, and it is so assertive that for a cold brew around 8 g per liter is plenty.

Iced apple cinnamon black tea is the closest a pitcher gets to cider without a press: four bags of apple cinnamon black tea, four cups of cold water, a sliced apple and a cinnamon stick, 8 to 12 hours in the refrigerator, then two tablespoons of honey stirred in. The tea is a level 2, brewed hot at 203°F (95°C) for 3½ minutes with 2.5 g per cup, so it is an afternoon pitcher. It is also the one drink on this list that works at both temperatures: brew it hot on those numbers, keep the apple slices, and it becomes the warm cup for whoever came in from the cold.

The licorice root and star anise mocktail is the grown-up glass with no spirits in it. The syrup comes from three tablespoons of licorice root steeped 12 minutes in a cup of hot water, then simmered five minutes with a quarter cup of sugar and one star anise. In the glass: 60 ml of that syrup, 20 ml of lime juice, ice and a cup of soda water. Licorice is level 0 and brewed hot at 212°F (100°C) for 8 minutes with 3 g per cup. One safety note, which the licorice page carries from the US National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health: licorice root is for an occasional glass, not the whole evening, because its glycyrrhizin can cause serious adverse effects in large amounts or over the long term, and the center advises particular care for people with high blood pressure or heart or kidney conditions, and during pregnancy. This isn't medical advice — if you have a specific condition, check with a healthcare provider.

The cardamom rose mocktail goes with the sweets. Simmer half a cup of sugar, half a cup of water and ten cracked cardamom pods for five minutes, cool and strain; then build each glass with 30 ml of that syrup, half a teaspoon of rose water, 15 ml of lime juice, ice and 90 ml of chilled soda water. Cardamom is level 0, brewed hot at 212°F (100°C) for 5 minutes with 3 g per cup, so this glass can arrive as late as the dessert does.

Iced vanilla rooibos horchata is the creamy one, and the one children ask for twice: three bags of vanilla rooibos in two cups of cold water overnight, blended with a cup of almond milk, two tablespoons of condensed milk, half a teaspoon of ground cinnamon and half a teaspoon of vanilla, served over crushed ice. Level 0, and our catalog brews it hot at 203°F (95°C) for 5 minutes with 2.5 g per cup.

Caffeine decides where each pitcher sits

Four of the six are level 0 on our caffeine ladder: hibiscus, licorice, cardamom and rooibos. Those are the pitchers for the children's end of the table and for the last hour of the evening. The apple cinnamon black tea is a level 2 and the Darjeeling a level 3, so they belong to the arrival and the afternoon, the same place a pot of black tea would go. If children are at the table, our kids' tea party guide has the rest: lukewarm or iced, never from the kettle, and small cups. Label every pitcher; a card with the name and the caffeine level answers the question before anyone asks it.

Pitcher math for 8 to 12 guests

We plan on about two glasses per person across the evening, and a liter of cold brew serves about four tall glasses over ice, so twelve guests is roughly 24 glasses, or six liters spread across the pitchers. The pitcher recipes scale by plain multiplication: doubling the Agua de Jamaica (two cups of flowers, twelve cups of water, a cup of sugar, four tablespoons of lime) gives eight glasses, and doubling the apple cinnamon pitcher (eight bags in eight cups of water, two apples, two cinnamon sticks) gives eight more. For loose leaf, the grams-per-liter bands do the work: 10–12 g/L for black teas and 8–12 g/L for herbal infusions. The two mocktails scale by syrup: one batch of cardamom syrup gives roughly six glasses at 30 ml each, and one batch of licorice syrup about four at 60 ml, so make two batches of whichever you expect to pour most. Soda water is the number people forget: between 90 ml and a cup per glass, a liter bottle is gone after four to ten glasses, so buy more than feels sensible.

What to make the night before

Put the bubbles in at the table, not in the kitchen; everything else can be done a day ahead. The night before, start the three cold brews (Darjeeling, apple cinnamon and rooibos), which need 8 to 12 hours, and make the two syrups, which keep in a jar in the refrigerator. In the morning, strain the cold brews, brew and chill the Agua de Jamaica, blend the horchata and slice the fruit. Keep the strained bases in the refrigerator until the first guest arrives, and put the soda water in the coldest spot you have: a mocktail built from a warm base and warm soda is flat before it reaches the table. The timing section of our guide to hosting afternoon tea at home and the menus in the tea party food guide cover the rest of the table.

The table around the drinks

With the drinks sorted, what remains is the plan around them: who is coming, what goes on the plates, when each kettle and each pitcher comes out. The Tea Party Planning Kit is our free kit for exactly that, with a quantity calculator that turns your headcount into a shopping list, a printed timeline from two weeks out to the final hour, and a printables pack whose tea tents work just as well as pitcher labels. Every tea above has its page in our catalog, with the brewing numbers and the full recipe for each drink.