Hey! It's hot outside! Like, really, really hot! Many go to boozy beverages to beat the summertime heat, but alcohol is well understood to be a vasodilator, meaning that it makes your blood vessels expand. This increases the surface area of your blood vessels, which allows for greater heat transfer between your body and the outside world. Not so bad when the outside temperature is lower than the average 98.6 body temp., but pretty useless as a cool-down method if it's well above that (as it often is, here in Austin). In addition to alcohol's vasodilation effect, the booze juice also causes a
whole-body "hot" sensation, in spite of any compensatory core body temperature lowering caused by the vasodilation.
TL;DR: Booze will make you feel hot!
So, what to drink on a hot summer day, instead? Austin cafes and restaurants provide a great selection of refreshing soft drinks.
Bouldin Creek Cafe's Rose Lemonade or Lavender Mate Sour are amazing, as is the Dirty Horchata at
Spiderhouse. As a perpetually-broke college student with a really cute, but very needy, cat, I like to get my refreshment on at home. Here are some of my favorite summer soft-drinks!
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| Meet Matilda. We like to drink lemonade together and take long naps. |
Rosa de Jamaica
Long-term residents of Texas may already be very familiar with this classic Latin American iced tea, usually sold in restaurants as just iced hibiscus tea. I don't know why, but it's way better if you call it rosa de jamaica, or just jamaica, instead of hibiscus tea.
You can find the dried, packaged flowers for cheap at any
Fiesta supermarket, or ask at your nearby bodega. I like to steep a whole bag of the flowers in about six cups of simmering water for a solid half hour (take it off the heat after it simmers). This makes a very strong concentrate. Skim off the flowers with a slotted spoon, or pour it through a strainer. If you like it sweet, now is the time to add the sugar, honey, or alternative sweetener. If you want to remix it, try adding a handful of mint leaves to the simmering flowers a few minutes into steeping (it's delicious!). Add water to the concentrated tea to get it to the desired strength. I like to dilute down one batch at a time, and save the rest of the concentrate in jars in the freezer. Try freezing the concentrate in an ice cube tray, and add the frozen cubes to sparkling water as desired. Any way you slice it, you're on the express train to yum town!
Lemonade
A tall glass of fresh-squeezed lemonade just screams summertime refreshment! But, being a flavor-obsessed weirdo, I am totally not content with just the same old mix of lemon juice, sugar, and water. Here are my favorite ways to chop and screw this summer classic:
- Fresh herbs! Basil, mint, and lavender all go great with lemonade. But how to avoid having a fresh herb salad in your glass? Easy: flavor your sugar! Bring about a cup of water to a boil. Turn off the heat, throw in about 3/4 cup sugar and add a handful of fresh herbs. Stir to dissolve the sugar. Let that sit until cool. You now have flavored simple syrup! Strain into a container and use the flavored syrup to sweeten your lemonade.
- Bubbles! My sweet Mama bought me a
SodaStream for Christmas, so I'm obsessed with using sparkling water in place of still water in EVERYTHING! (Well, except soup. That sounds a little gross.) You'll need to make lemonade "concentrate" (so, just the lemon juice and sugar or flavored simple syrup) then add that to your glass of soda water in small batches and stir, don't shake (sorry, James Bond). The
Wheatsville co-op, HEB, Fiesta, and some smaller neighborhood bodegas all sell large bottles of sparkling water (look for Topo Chico 2-liters, Crystal Geyser 1.25 liter bottles, or liter bottles of club soda) so you can keep the bubbles coming.
- Weird citrus! Lime-ade isn't too crazy, but what about those weird lime-lemon-tangerine hybrids in your neighbor's backyard? Backyard citrus hybrids are relatively common, and weird varieties are becoming more common on supermarket shelves or at farmer's markets, too. Austin isn't well-known for its citrus, unfortunately, but if you see something, juice it and make weird-citrus-ade.
- Fancy syrups! Bouldin Creek Cafe, as mentioned, has this concept on lock. Try out whatever fancy syrup you can find at your local grocery store. I've got a bottle of pomegranate syrup just begging to be added to some lemonade. Orange blossom syrup is another obvious winner. Don't be afraid to experiment, but do it in small batches if you're doubtful of the outcome.
- Arnold Palmer! More than just a
famous golfer, an Arnold Palmer is a half-lemonade, half-iced-tea concoction beloved in the Southeast. Use sweet tea or unsweetened iced black tea depending on how sweet you want it. Deeeeelish!
Iced Black Tea
This is the basis of the beloved Southern sweet tea, though I prefer mine unsweetened. There are a few ways to make it, all of which are equally good. You can boil water, add the tea bags, then refrigerate it, or make it a little stronger and add ice cubes for fast results. You can also make sun tea, which involves sticking your teabags in tapwater in a big glass container, and setting that out in the sun for about half a day. My favorite way to make it is also the laziest: just throw some teabags in a big glass or plastic container full of water, and stick it in the fridge overnight. It comes out the same as sun tea, but you don't have to worry about forgetting it out there (which I always inevitably do) and ruining the whole batch.
OK, now, that's all well and good, but let's get fancy! Here are a couple iced tea remixes in addition to the aforementioned Arnold Palmer:
- Coke and Tea! Mix half-and-half for an odd, but delicious, treat!
- Flavored syrups! Follow the steps in the previous section to make some delicious flavored simple syrups at home, or add store-bought flavored syrups to unsweetened tea.
- Flavored teas! You don't have to stick to plain black tea. Anything that tastes great hot will probably taste great iced, too! I love to ice down chai tea with honey and a splash of milk. Delicious!
- Get some sweetened condensed milk in there! Mmm!
Feel free to leave your favorite delicious summer soft-drink recipes in the comments! Stay cool!
