I made a pale ale with Earl Grey tea earlier in the year and it turned out to be really good. My wife is a big tea lover and we made it as an experiment to see how it would turn out. I hadn’t ever had a beer with tea in it before and there aren’t a lot of resources out there, so it was a bit of a shot in the dark. But it turned out great and I’m planning to brew it again here in a few weeks. Here are some things I learned or did with the beer:
-Start with the absolute best quality loose leaf tea you can get. Using bagged tea from the grocery store isn’t probably what you’re after. We ordered white tip earl grey from Tea Source in Minneapolis and it was fantastic.
-We just put 2oz of loose leaf in a hop bag and put it in after fermentation was done just like you would dry hop. We left it in for a week, but you should taste some samples along the way to see if the flavor is getting where you want. We didn’t do anything to sanitize the tea FYI.
-When you “dry hop”with the tea, you’re gonna get more of the aroma compounds of the tea and less of the flavor. To compensate for this, we made a strong tea concentrate by brewing some tea and adding it to the beer at kegging to up the tea flavor.
-This article and Chop and Brew video were the best (and almost only) resource I found:
http://chopandbrew.com/episodes/chop-brew-episode-38-homebrewing-with-tea/
https://www.teasource.com/blogs/beyond-the-leaf/64236547-water-malt-hops-yeast-and-tea
Hope that helps some!