How Is Sparkling Tea Made?

The short answer is that it depends entirely on who's making it and what they're going for. Unlike wine, which has centuries of codified production methods and regional rules, sparkling tea is a young category where producers are still figuring out what's possible. That's part of what makes it interesting.

There are three main methods worth understanding, and each produces a fundamentally different drink.

Cold-brewed and carbonated

This is the most wine-like production method and the one closest in spirit to how Champagne is made: precise, deliberate, and obsessive about the raw material.

Copenhagen Sparkling Tea Company's founder Jacob Kocemba, a Danish sommelier, brews up to thirteen different organic teas individually, each at its own specific temperature and for its own specific duration. Hot brewing extracts bitterness; cold brewing extracts aromatics and delicacy. The teas are then blended like a winemaker assembling a cuvée, and lightly carbonated before bottling.

The result is a drink with genuine structure and complexity without any fermentation involved. No cultures, no live organisms, no funk. Just tea, brewed with extraordinary care, and treated like a fine ingredient.

Fermented

This is where things get more complex and more divisive, and also where the comparison to natural wine is most apt.

Unified Ferments in Brooklyn uses a kombucha-style fermentation, introducing live cultures to brewed tea, but they approach it the way a serious winemaker approaches fermentation: as a tool for developing complexity rather than an end in itself. The fermentation adds acidity, depth, and a subtle living quality that cold-brewed teas don't have. It also adds the sour note on the finish that runs through their entire lineup, which is either the thing you love most about them or the thing that takes a bottle to get used to.

The critical difference from kombucha is intent. Most kombucha is fermented to taste like kombucha. Unified Ferments ferments to translate the tea, to unpack what the specific leaf is capable of and present it in a glass. The tea is always the point.

Wild-foraged and infused

The most distinctive and seasonal production method, and the one most directly analogous to terroir-driven winemaking.

Villbrygg in Norway harvests wild botanicals during a narrow May through September window when Nordic plants are at their peak. Lingonberries, spruce shoots, meadowsweet, fireweed, birch leaves. What isn't harvested fresh is dried and stored for brewing through the year, which means the character of each batch is tied directly to when and where the plants were gathered.

This is terroir in the most literal sense: the flavor in the bottle is a function of the land, the season, and the year. A dry summer in Norway changes the lingonberry. A late spring shifts the spruce shoot harvest window. Nobody has written the vintage charts for Norwegian botanical brews yet, but the variation is real.

Why production method matters for the glass

The easiest way to understand the difference is to pour a Copenhagen LYSEGRØN and a Unified Ferments Wen Shan Bao Zhong side by side. The Copenhagen is clean, precise, and immediately accessible. The tea is present but refined, like a well-made white wine. The Unified Ferments has more complexity, more funk, more of a living quality. Neither is better. They're just doing different things.

Terroir and vintage in sparkling tea

This is the part of the category that nobody has fully explored yet, largely because sparkling tea is so new that most producers are still figuring out their baseline.

But the building blocks of terroir are all here. Single-origin teas from specific farms in Taiwan, China, or India carry the same kind of place-based character that wine grapes do. A fourth-generation tea-producing family in Taiwan's Nantou region has spent generations understanding how their specific land and climate expresses itself in the leaf. That knowledge, and that variation, ends up in the bottle.

Vintage variation is coming too. As producers get more seasons under their belt and start talking about them publicly, the idea of a better or worse harvest year for sparkling tea will become part of the conversation. For now, the category is young enough that most bottles don't carry a vintage. But the variation is already there for anyone paying attention.

We're paying attention. That's part of what this shop is for.