This post is part of the Whiskey Infusion Experiments series. Infusing whiskey allows you to craft unique drinks tailored to your tastes, using flavors like spices, fruits, and herbs. Start with a favorite whiskey and dry ingredients, using a sealable glass jar for the infusion. Experiment with ratios and taste daily to achieve your desired flavor profile. Enjoy the creative journey!
After the success of my chamomile bourbon infusion experiment, I started wondering what other teas might play well with whiskey. Chamomile had proven that tea could add something interesting to bourbon without turning it into a strange cocktail experiment, so naturally the next step was to try something a little more ambitious.
Finding a Tea That Could Stand Up to Bourbon
The only problem was that I didn’t actually know much about tea — other than the Lipton’s I grew up drinking and still love to this day.
In fact, before this experiment, I had never even heard of oolong tea. It wasn’t something sitting in my pantry waiting to be used.
Instead of grabbing a typical grocery store tea, I started looking for something with flavor characteristics that might overlap with whiskey. Bourbon already brings caramel, vanilla, oak, and sometimes toasted or nutty notes. So the goal was to find a tea that might complement those flavors rather than fight them.
Why Oolong?
After a little research, I found one often described as having notes of stone fruit, tobacco, and caramel — organic Fujian Wuyi Dahongpao (Big Red Robe) loose-leaf oolong.
Those flavors sounded suspiciously familiar to anyone who spends time around bourbon, which made it feel like a good candidate for an infusion experiment.
Turning Tea Instructions Into a Bourbon Experiment
The recommended brewing instructions called for 8-10 grams of tea with 150-200 ml of water. That seemed like a perfectly reasonable starting point — except for one small adjustment: I replaced the water with bourbon. And of course, I couldn’t just do 150-200 ml of bourbon. I went with 6,000 ml of Buffalo Trace instead. (The photo only shows 5,000 ml — the last bottle went in after the picture was taken.)
Same ratio. Slightly different brewing method.
Instead of brewing the tea, I treated the leaves like an infusion ingredient. The loose leaves went into a jar, bourbon followed, and then the waiting began. Tea extracts quickly, so this was less of a “set it and forget it” process and more of a daily check-in to see how things were developing.
And it turns out oolong is a lot stronger than chamomile.
The Results After Three Days
After tasting the infusion each day, it became clear that the tea was pulling flavor much faster than my previous experiment. By day three the roasted character of the oolong was already showing up clearly in the bourbon, and it felt like the right moment to stop before bitterness had a chance to move in.
So at three days, I called the experiment finished. Any longer and things probably would have started going in the wrong direction.
The bourbon still carried its familiar backbone of caramel, vanilla, and oak, but the tea added an unexpected layer of complexity. The Dahongpao’s roasted character blended naturally with the whiskey, and the infusion developed a slightly fruity edge that surprised a few people during tasting.
While the tea itself is often described with notes like stone fruit, tobacco, and caramel, several tasters picked up something a little different in the finished bourbon — raspberries and caramel being the most common description.
That’s the fun part about experiments like this. You start with a theory, follow it just far enough to see what happens, and occasionally stumble onto something that works better than expected.
In this case, bourbon met oolong, the flavors actually made sense together, and the experiment ended exactly where it should have.
Three days in.
Nobody hurt.
And one very interesting bottle of bourbon.
