Sparkling Tea Spritz: A Zero-Proof Aperitivo Recipe

A sparkling tea spritz is a spritz with no alcohol in it: 60 ml (2 oz) of a bitter zero-proof aperitivo and 90 ml (3 oz) of sparkling tea, poured into a wine glass full of ice and finished with a twist of citrus peel. Those two numbers come straight from the classic. The International Bartenders Association, which keeps the official specifications for classic cocktails, writes the spritz as 90 ml of prosecco (an Italian sparkling wine) and 60 ml of Aperol (a bright orange Italian bitter liqueur), with a splash of soda, built in a wine glass full of ice and finished with a slice of orange. Bubbles, something bitter, a lot of cold. Nothing in that frame needs alcohol.

Here the bubbles come from Copenhagen Sparkling Tea, a Danish alcohol-free sparkling drink made from blends of up to 13 organic teas. The bitter comes from a zero-proof (alcohol-free) aperitivo built on gentian root. The result is pale, bitter at the edges and long enough to hold a conversation, and one bottle of tea plus a two-pack of the aperitivo makes six glasses.

A drink named for a splash

The word is German. Spritzen means to squirt or spray, and the Digital Dictionary of the German Language gives it a second, very practical sense: to cut a drink such as wine or juice with soda water. Ask a German speaker for einen Gespritzten and that is exactly what you get. The spritz poured at bars today adds a bitter liqueur to that splash. The other word in this recipe's title has an older root still. Aperitivo is the Italian name for a drink before dinner, and its English cousin aperitif, borrowed from French, goes back to the Latin aperire, to open. Today the word names a drink taken before a meal to stimulate the appetite.

Both ideas survive here. The sparkling tea does the spraying, and the bitterness does the opening.

Why tea can stand in for prosecco

Prosecco does three jobs in a spritz: it brings bubbles, acidity and a dry backbone that keeps the bitter liqueur from tasting like syrup. Sparkling tea covers the same ground by other means. The producer's ingredient lists include lemon juice plus citric and lactic acid for acidity. For structure there is tea itself: the description of BLÅ credits its long finish to the subtle tannins of Darjeeling First Flush tea (tannins are the compounds in tea that leave your mouth feeling slightly dry after a strong cup). And the producer lists every bottle at 5 bars of pressure, about five times the air pressure at sea level, which is where the sparkle comes from.

The drink began in a restaurant. According to the company, sommelier Jacob Kocemba developed it in 2010 while working at a Michelin-starred restaurant in Copenhagen, partnered with Bo Sten Hansen in 2017, and sold the first bottle in Copenhagen on May 26 of that year. The Copenhagen Sparkling Tea guide covers the story and the food pairings in depth. For a spritz, what matters is that the three bottles behave very differently once something bitter goes in with them.

Matching the tea to the bitter

One of the clearest differences among the three zero-proof bottles is sugar, and the sweeter the base, the more bitterness a spritz can carry before it tastes harsh. The figures below come from the producer's own published numbers, worked out for this recipe's 90 ml pour.

Bottle What leads Sugar per liter Sugar in a 90 ml pour Caffeine in a 90 ml pour Best partner in a spritz
LYSERØD Oolong, hibiscus, Silver Needle white tea; red berries and red apple 20 g about 1.8 g about 5.4 mg The gentian bitter, with grapefruit peel. The driest pairing
BLÅ Jasmine, white tea and Darjeeling First Flush; chamomile and citrus on the nose 50 g about 4.5 g about 4.9 mg The gentian bitter, with lemon peel. Floral against bitter
LYSEGRØN Green tea including Sencha; citrus, lemongrass, green apple 40 g about 3.6 g about 8.0 mg The citrus build below, or the gentian bitter with grapefruit

Some tea terms in the table: oolong is a partly oxidized tea, sitting between green and black. Silver Needle is a white tea made only from unopened buds. Sencha is a Japanese green tea, and First Flush means the first spring picking in Darjeeling, India.

LYSERØD (shop Copenhagen Sparkling Tea LYSERØD) is the one for guests who like their aperitivo properly bitter; with the least sugar of the three, it lets the gentian stand out sharply. BLÅ (shop Copenhagen Sparkling Tea BLÅ) is rounder, and the jasmine perfume sits on top of the bitterness the way orange sits on top of a classic Aperol spritz. LYSEGRØN (shop Copenhagen Sparkling Tea LYSEGRØN) is the brightest, already halfway to a citrus drink, which makes it the natural base for the citrus build further down.

The caffeine column matters before a late holiday party. Every one of these teas is real tea, so every glass has some. The FDA puts a 12-ounce cup of black tea at about 71 milligrams and says an 8-ounce cup of decaf coffee typically has 2 to 15. The tea in one of these spritzes lands inside that decaf range.

The bitter: gentian

The bitter partner here is St. Agrestis Phony White Negroni (shop Phony White Negroni), a non-alcoholic aperitivo developed at the company's Brooklyn distillery from the base of its Phony Negroni, driven by amplified gentian root and then clarified to near-clear. It comes ready to pour in 200 ml bottles, which works out neatly: two bottles cover six spritzes. The St. Agrestis producer guide tells the rest of the company's story.

Gentian is the root of the plant Gentiana lutea, and the European Medicines Agency's 2018 assessment report on it notes that gentian root is known as a bitter ingredient of many beverages. The same report gives two of its bitter compounds a "bitter value," a laboratory measure in which a higher number means more bitter. Gentiopicroside scores 12,000. Amarogentin scores 58 million, and the report calls it the most bitter substance known.

Because the Phony White Negroni is clarified to near-clear, the finished spritz takes most of its color from the tea, which the producer describes as light green with yellow nuances for BLÅ, clear with green nuances for LYSEGRØN and light pink for LYSERØD. In the glass it reads much like sparkling wine, which suits a table where some guests are drinking wine and some are not.

Ingredients, for six

  • 1 bottle (750 ml) Copenhagen Sparkling Tea, LYSERØD, BLÅ or LYSEGRØN, refrigerated
  • 360 ml (12 oz) St. Agrestis Phony White Negroni, from two 200 ml bottles, refrigerated
  • 1 grapefruit, or 2 lemons, for peel
  • Ice, enough to fill six large wine glasses to the rim
  • Optional: soda water, refrigerated, for a lighter drink

Method

  1. Chill everything first. Put the sparkling tea and the Phony White Negroni in the refrigerator for at least three hours. If there is room, put the glasses in the freezer for fifteen minutes. This is the step that decides whether the drink stays lively, for reasons explained just below.
  2. Cut the peels before anything is opened. Take six wide strips of grapefruit or lemon peel with a sharp vegetable peeler, keeping the white pith underneath as thin as you can, since the pith adds a coarse bitterness of its own. For long thin twists, use a channel knife, a small tool that cuts a narrow groove of peel (shop the Cocktail Kingdom channel knife). Once the tea is open it should not wait while you hunt for a knife.
  3. Fill the glasses to the rim with ice. The IBA builds its spritz in a wine glass, and a large one leaves room for a full load of ice. A 12-ounce Collins glass, a tall straight-sided tumbler (shop Buswell Collins glasses) holds the same pour with room for ice.
  4. Pour the bitter. Measure 60 ml (2 oz) of Phony White Negroni into each glass. A 1 oz / 2 oz jigger, a double-ended bar measure (shop the Leopold jigger) makes it one pour. Bitter goes in first so the tea mixes it on the way down.
  5. Open the tea and pour it gently. At 5 bars of pressure, treat the bottle as you would sparkling wine: point it away from faces and glassware, keep a hand over the closure, and ease it open slowly. Pour 90 ml (3 oz) slowly down the inside wall of each glass instead of straight onto the ice. Then give each glass one slow lift from the bottom with a long barspoon (shop the Leopold barspoon) rather than stirring.
  6. Add the peel, then taste. Hold a strip of peel skin side down over the glass and pinch it. This is called expressing the peel: a fine spray of citrus oil lands on the surface, and you should smell it immediately. Rub the peel around the rim and drop it in. Now taste. If the bitterness is too strong, add a little more sparkling tea. If the drink feels heavy, add a splash of cold soda water.

Cold is an ingredient

Carbon dioxide, the gas that makes the bubbles, dissolves better in cold liquid than in warm. Chemists describe this with Henry's law, which says the amount of a gas a liquid will hold depends on the pressure of that gas above it and on temperature. Using the constants the National Institute of Standards and Technology publishes for carbon dioxide in water, liquid at refrigerator temperature (about 39°F, or 4°C) holds roughly 1.6 times as much carbon dioxide at the same pressure as liquid at room temperature (about 68°F, or 20°C).

That number explains most of the method. A cold bottle opens with less of a rush and keeps more of its gas in the glass. A warm one throws its bubbles off fast, and what is left tastes flatter. Ice helps only if everything poured over it is already cold; room-temperature tea poured onto ice loses gas while it chills.

In Denver

Air pressure falls with altitude. Colorado State University Extension gives 14.7 pounds per square inch (psi) at sea level and 12.3 psi at 5,000 feet, and NASA's standard atmosphere model puts Denver's 5,280 feet at roughly 82 percent of sea-level pressure. Henry's law, though, is about the pressure of carbon dioxide itself, not of air in general. Once the bottle is open, the gas above the drink is ordinary air, and NOAA's Mauna Loa observatory measured carbon dioxide at about 426 parts per million in September 2026, roughly 0.04 percent of the air. Against a bottle sealed at 5 bars, that is next to nothing, so an open sparkling drink heads toward flat in Denver just as it does at sea level. Temperature is the lever a Denver host actually controls, which is why steps 1 and 5 matter: chill the bottle well, open it only when the glasses are filled with ice and bitter, and pour all six glasses at once rather than leaving half a bottle open on the counter. Other ways altitude changes a kitchen are in the Denver altitude cooking guide.

The citrus build

For guests who want something brighter than bitter, swap the gentian for citrus. Raft Citrus Rosemary syrup (shop Raft Citrus Rosemary syrup) is made from organic cane sugar, orange juice, lime juice and rosemary, and its maker recommends a tablespoon for a 4 to 5 ounce cocktail. This build uses that ratio.

Per glass: one tablespoon (15 ml) of the syrup, 120 ml (4 oz) of LYSEGRØN, a splash of soda if you like, and a strip of orange or lemon peel, built the same way over a full glass of ice. A 750 ml bottle covers six. Because the syrup brings sugar of its own, LYSEGRØN, with less sugar than BLÅ and citrus already in its blend, keeps the drink from tipping sweet. More zero-proof syrups worth trying in the same slot are in the drink syrups collection.

When the glass is wrong

What you taste Likely cause What to do
Flat within a few minutes Warm tea, a bottle opened earlier, or a hard pour onto the ice Cold bottle, opened at the last moment, poured down the side of the glass
Like juice, with no edge Too little bitter for the tea, or a higher-sugar tea paired with a citrus syrup Add more gentian bitter, or switch to LYSERØD
Harsh and medicinal Too much bitter for the tea, or thick white pith on the peel Top with more sparkling tea; cut thinner peel next round
Watery Too little ice, or warm glasses Fill the glass to the rim; chill the glasses

At the table

An aperitivo drink is built for salt. Olives, salted nuts and potato chips all do the job, and LYSEGRØN and LYSERØD have both been paired by their producer with seafood, oysters in particular, so a tin of good fish and some bread turns a round of spritzes into a light supper. For a bigger crowd, the spritz bar guide lays out how to set up a self-serve station with a classic track and a zero-proof track side by side, and the zero-proof Negroni recipe makes a natural second drink. The non-alcoholic drinks guide maps the wider territory. More bottles for the zero-proof side of the table are in the non-alcoholic cocktails collection.

A spritz is a structure, not a spirit: bubbles, bitterness and cold, in a fixed ratio. Build that structure from tea and gentian, keep it colder than seems necessary, and the glass at the zero-proof end of the table is the same drink as the one beside it.

The Ambrosian Pantry is at 263 Josephine Street in Cherry Creek, Denver, and products ship nationwide from theambrosianpantry.com.

Sources & Further Reading

Back to blog

Shop this story

Shop this story (6)

Keep reading

More from The Pantry Kitchen