Sun tea
Tea left to steep in a jar in direct sunlight for several hours. It is a traditional American summer method, and it is the one preparation in this catalogue where TeaHQ recommends a substitute rather than the method itself.
Also called solar tea, window-brewed tea.
How it works
Leaf or bags are put into a large jar of cold water and left in the sun for two to five hours, then strained and chilled. Sunlight warms the water to somewhere around 30 to 40 °C — warm enough to extract slowly, and also squarely within the range in which bacteria present on leaf or in water multiply fastest. Several public-health bodies advise against the method for that reason.
Why choose it
Honestly: it has no advantage over refrigerator cold brewing, which extracts the same compounds through the same slow low-temperature mechanism while keeping the water below the range where microbial growth is rapid. Sun tea is recorded here because readers ask about it and because the reason to avoid it is worth stating plainly rather than leaving them to find out.
Equipment
No vessel is recorded as required for this method. Browse teaware for what is commonly used, including what to reach for when the traditional object is not to hand.
Tea types it suits
Recorded on the method rather than inferred from the catalogue. A type missing here is not ruled out; it simply has not been written down.
Common problems
- Leaving it out for a full day, or leaving the finished tea unrefrigerated afterwards
- Using a jar that has not been thoroughly cleaned
- Choosing it over refrigerator cold brew, which is better in every respect including flavour
Teas with parameters authored for this method
2 teas have a parameter set written for sun tea, in alphabetical order. Each row is transcribed from that tea’s own record.
| Tea | Leaf (g/100 ml) | Water (°C) | Authored infusions | First infusion (s) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| English Breakfast | 1–1.5 | 20–40 | 1 | 14400 |
| Gunpowder green tea | 1–1.5 | 20–40 | 1 | 14400 |
Other cold brew methods
Same family, so the approach is close — the vessel, the ratio and the intent still differ.
- Cold brew tea — Leaf steeped in cold water in the refrigerator for several hours. Low temperature extracts the sweet and savoury compounds readily and the bitter and astringent ones barely at all, producing a cup that is genuinely different rather than simply a chilled version of a hot one.
- Ice steeping (kōridashi) — Ice cubes placed directly on dry leaf and left to melt, with no water added at all. The liquor arrives as the ice goes, drop by drop, and there is very little of it. It is the coldest steeping in ordinary practice and produces the most concentrated sweet extraction of any.
Sources
This page is TeaHQ synthesis. No external source stands behind the description of this method. It is written from common practice as TeaHQ understands it, and the parameters in the table above come from each tea’s own record rather than from this page.
The numbers for this method are held per tea, never on the method itself. Where a tea has no set written for sun tea, TeaHQ shows nothing rather than converting its numbers from another style — a scaled ratio and a halved time read as an answer while being one nobody authored.
Written comparisons
Where TeaHQ has set this method against something it is routinely confused with, and argued the differences out in full.
- Southern sweet tea vs sun tea — Two American summer preparations that are frequently combined and are technically opposite. Sweet tea is brewed hot and strong as a concentrate and sweetened while still hot; sun tea is left in a jar in sunlight for hours and never reaches brewing temperature at all.
- Sun tea vs refrigerator cold brew — Both steep tea slowly in water that was never boiled, and they are often treated as the same idea with different equipment. The temperature at which each one sits is what separates them, and it separates them on flavour as well as on the reason public-health guidance exists.