Thai Iced Tea

Steps

1. infuse5 min
   off the heat, boiling water poured over the leaf, uncovered, timed at 4 minutes
   Thai tea mix + freshly boiled water, steeped hard. Brew this deliberately too strong. Each glass is going to meet a full cup of ice and then a pour of milk, so somewhere between a third and a half of what you are tasting now will be diluted away — judge the base by imagining it cut, not by whether it is pleasant to drink. Timing it matters in both directions: under three minutes and the mix has not given up its colour or its body, past five and the tannin arrives without bringing any more strength with it. Know what you are brewing — the orange is food colouring in the commercial mix rather than anything the tea leaf does, which is why the from-scratch spiced version below comes out brown.
2. prep3 min
   cloth tea sock or fine mesh, worked up and down and then pressed out
   strain the tea, lifting the sock in and out of the liquid several times and squeezing it against the side at the end. Thai tea mix is a very fine cut and it holds a great deal of liquor between its particles; a half-hearted pour-through leaves a third of the extraction in the grounds, which is exactly the difference between a base that reads dark and one that reads merely brown. Yes, pressing pulls tannin out with the rest. It is supposed to — the sugar and the condensed milk that follow exist in part to carry that astringency, which is why an unsweetened Thai tea base tastes harsh and a sweetened one does not.
3. mix2 min
   into the tea while it is still hot, stirred until nothing is left on the spoon
   + sugar + sweetened condensed milk + a pinch of salt, dissolved completely. This has to happen hot. Sucrose dissolves several times faster in near-boiling liquid than in cold, and sweetened condensed milk is a viscous supersaturated syrup that will simply sink and sit in an iced glass — stir it in at the end and you get a sweet sludge on the bottom and thin bitter tea above it. The pinch of salt is not detectable as salt; it sharpens the perception of sweetness and keeps the condensed milk from reading flat and cloying. Taste now and over-sweeten on purpose, for the same reason you over-brewed.
4. rest60 min
   cooled to room temperature, then refrigerated until genuinely cold
   the sweetened base, chilled before it goes anywhere near ice. This is the step most home versions skip and it is the one that separates a good glass from a watery one. Hot tea poured over ice does not chill, it melts — and every gram of melted ice is unseasoned, unsweetened water diluting a base you deliberately built strong. Chill it properly and the ice in the glass only holds the temperature; it does not become an ingredient. Spread the base in a shallow tray if you are in a hurry.
5. mix2 min
   optional — poured back and forth between two vessels from arm's height
   the chilled base pulled between two jugs several times from as high as you can manage without wearing it. This is documented street practice and it is the marker of a fresh-brewed stall rather than a theatrical flourish: the fall drags air into the liquid and shears the milk fat into finer droplets, which builds a head of foam and gives the drink a rounder body in the mouth. It is genuinely optional and the drink is correct without it.
6. top1 min
   over a full glass of ice, evaporated milk floated last over the back of a spoon, served unstirred
   chilled base poured over ice to about three-quarters of the glass, then + evaporated milk, roughly 2 tbsp, poured slowly over the back of a spoon so it sits on the surface and falls through in a white cascade. The two canned milks are doing different jobs and are not interchangeable: sweetened condensed goes in hot, early, for sweetness and body, while evaporated goes on cold, last, unsweetened, for the dairy note and the layered look — stirred into the hot base it would simply disappear, and its fresh milky top note would cook flat. Serve it unstirred and let whoever is drinking it pull the layers together.