DIY Mate Ice Tea

Make your own caffeinated Mate ice tea, aka the "hacker's fuel of choice", also good with some rum to make Tschunk.

Prevents carrying heavy cases of Club-Mate and you get to customize and create your own Mate variant.
We went for a lot more lemon flavour.

Ingredients:

• Mate tea leaves
• Lemons
• Sugar
• Carbonation machine
• Some empty bottles to store your drink

Add about 3 to 4 tablespoons of mate tea leaves to a teapot and fill to the brim with about 80°C hot water. Just boil the water and wait for a few minutes to let it cool slightly.

Steep the tea for at least 10 minutes. We want to create quite a strong tea. Don't worry if the leaves steep a little longer, the tea won't become bitter. you can even reuse the mate tea leaves a second time.

While the tea is still hot, dissolve about 2 to 3 tablespoons of sugar. This result might seems very sweet, but that is expected. alternatively to sugar, you could also use Stevia leaves (available in health food stores) or other alternative sweeteners.

Let the tea cool down, e.g. outside or in the fridge.

Once the tea is cold, squeeze some lemons and add lemon juice to taste (we ended up using the juice of one and a half lemons).

As a last step, add carbonation to the ice tea, if desired.

Fill your finished DIY Mate ice tea into glass bottles, refrigerate and enjoy!