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Nothing says Summer quite like a big, tall glass of iced tea. Black, green, sweet or not – there’s a certain refreshment found in it, no matter how you like yours. There’s no better way to cool off on a hot summer day than to set up a tea bar to share a little summer refreshment with your family and friends!
Setting up a tea bar doesn’t have to be complicated. If you can boil water and rinse some fruit, you’re good to go! You can make your tea bar as fancy or as casual as you like, the most important thing is that you start with a great tea.
First things first, I hit up Target for my supplies. I needed Bigelow Tea, both black and green and some fresh fruit. Bigelow offers a variety of flavored teas, but I wanted to let my guests chose their own flavors, so simple black and green teas were perfect.
This tea is packaged for individual cups, but you can easily brew it a gallon at a time. For a gallon, I simply boiled a few cups of water, added 10 tea bags, allowed them to steep covered for 10 minutes, then poured it into my pitcher and added ice. As the ice melts, you can add more until you end up with a full gallon. I prefer to do it this way as opposed to just adding water because as the ice melts, it helps really cool the tea down.
You can really go crazy with your mix in options or you can stick to some simple favorites. We had fresh cherries, blackberries (from our backyard), raspberries, peaches, citrus fruits, honey, sugar and fresh mint (also from the garden.) Guests can grab a glass, add their favorites, give them a little mush with a spoon to release the juices and add the tea of their choice. This blackberry, mint and peach was fantastic in green tea with just a pinch of sugar.
A simple printed suggestion list is an easy way to help your guests along in choosing their flavor combinations. Honey, lemon and mint is another excellent combination. My personal favorite was cherries, honey and black tea. There’s no need to pit the cherries… the pits will just hang in the bottom of the glass and are too large to worry about sucking up in your straw.
Our tea bar was clearly a post pool affair, one that my daughter absolutely loved! Instead of having a lemonade stand, she wants to set up a tea bar by the street and sell glasses of tea to passers by. Instead of being trendy, she wants to #TrendTea. I love her entrepreneurial spirit, but for now I want to keep our tea bar to ourselves.
Do you ever set up fun drink stations at your parties or backyard gatherings? I’d love to hear your thoughts on our tea bar and your ideas for making it your own. Leave us a comment and let us know what you think! In the mean time, you can check out Bigelow Tea through a variety of social media channels and enter their Made in the USA Sweepstakes:
Bigelow Tea Website
Bigelow Tea on Facebook
Bigelow Tea on Twitter
How fun! Love those mason jar glasses!
Love the whole table setup! Now I just need to get moved into our new house so I can do something like this! 🙂
This looks like the perfect summer party!
I love this idea!! I want to do it now!
This is such an amazing idea!! Cannot wait to do this!
Oh I love how you used jars for this idea! This sounds like a super fun idea for summer!
This is such a great idea! We’re going to have to try this soon.
Looks like a wonderful way to spend an afternoon!
Your daughter is too cute with her idea to sell tea instead of setting up a lemonade stand! Great idea to incorporate fresh fruit, honey, and sugar for a fun summer Bigelow tea bar! #client
I love tea! So delicious! A tea bar is a great idea!
Such a cute idea. I am a big tea fan!
This is beautiful! What a great idea!
This is such a great idea, I love it!
That’s a great idea and a yummy one. Thanks for linking up to Sweet and Savoury Sunday, stop by and link up again. Have a great day!!
I love tea, I would totally stop at a tea stand any day! I love your daughters idea!
Thank you for stopping by the Thoughtful Spot Weekly Blog Hop this week. We hope to see you drop by our neck of the woods next week!
This is such a fun idea! Adding the fruit really takes the tea up a notch 🙂
Featuring tomorrow at Bacon Time!
Very cool, thank you!
You linked this up at the right place. I love me some tea and am drinking some out of a mason jar as I write this! This is SO CUTE. Thanks for sharing! Pinning this.
Thanks for linking up at Wordy Wednesday!
What a great set up for a summer party! Visiting from the small victories sunday link-up, pinned to my part board so I don’t forget this idea! 🙂
Love your tea bar… what a great idea …Thank you for sharing at Share It One More Time..Tammy