brewing with tea, how to sanitize?

[ericsabbat]

I made up a recipe for a green tea imperial pilsner and am sitting here staring at all my ingredients and I just realized I have no idea how I am going to make what worked perfectly in my head a reality.

Here is the process I was imagining

Brew pilsner and let it completely finish fermenting
diacetyl rest
fill carboy with green tea and rack beer onto it
lager
Rack off and keg


sitting here thinking about it though I'm curious if I may wind up introducing unknown bugs into the equation doing things that way. I know others have brewed with tea before although I've never seen a post about throwing beer on the tea and letting it sit. I'm comfortable I won't have tanin extraction with the tea I chose, especially not at lager temps I am however worried about introducing bacteria to the beer after taking so much time and effort to keep it infection free.

Am I just being paranoid at this point?

 

[Calder]

30 minutes at 145 F, or 30 seconds at 160 F will pasturize it. Tea is normally brewed at higher temperatures than this. Sanitize the container you add the tea to (use some boiling water for that), put in the tea and add the hot water. Cover and leave until needed.

Make it in some Mason jars and cap when hot. The jar will seal and you can keep it in the fridge for a while.

 

[koerd85]

hope your not talking about brewing by the "tea bag" method

 

[Hackinjeebs]

hmmm.. I might be off on this. What if you soaked the tea in a small amount of vodka long enough to sanitize it, then just dumped it all in. Unless I am mistaken, it would sanitize and even increase your ABV a bit. I am not very familiar with tea though.

 

[ericsabbat]

The original idea was to essentially make tea with beer instead of water but if I just toss it in the beer I couldn't figure out how long to steep to get flavor but no bitterness, and if that will infect the batch doing it that way.

I have enough tea to make a full 5 gallons. Want to steer clear of vodka because if this comes out good we'll be making it at a brewery on a bigger scale and you can't use spirits without a different license

 

[dnslater]

I'm new at this, but I made a chamomile tea with warm spring water and three tea bags for my last batch of Witbier. I let it steep in the warm water during the 60 minute boil and tossed the liquid in the last 5 minutes to ensure that it was sanitized. The actual tea leaves never made contact with boiling water, which should have prevented any tannins or acids from leaching out? Witbier turned out great. The hint of Chamomile really compliments the orange peal and coriander in the Wit according to my wife and her sisters.

The vodka idea is also a solid.

 

[thezepster]

I havent done this, but... I would just brew some tea like you would do when you drink it. boil a couple of cups of water then take the water off the burner and stick the tea in and let all the tea aromas and flavors get extracted in the water (it will also be sterilized because of the heat). then while the water is still hot (~150 degrees) dump it into the bottling bucket and rack on top of it. you will probably have to do trial and error to figure out how much tea you need to get what youre wanting