TEA time and happy hour, once mutually exclusive rivals, are proud to announce their merger. The synergistic effects of this can already be seen spreading throughout the city: At the Tea Lounge on Union Street, in Park Slope, Brooklyn, tea drinkers and cocktail fans find common ground in the Moroccan mojito, made of rum fused with whole-leaf Moroccan mint tea.

At the Flatiron Lounge in Manhattan, Julie Reiner shakes a hibiscus tea syrup with gin and South African berry juice and bills it a Hibiscus Swizzle; farther downtown, Audrey Saunders of Pegu Club infuses gin with Earl Grey tea leaves for her Earl Grey MarTEAni. The flood of Asian mega-restaurant openings has yielded a verdigris river of green-tea cocktails. Spiked tea has even made its way into the traditionally teetotaling realm of the spa.

"I've always thought of a great cocktail as a spa in a glass," said Rachel Lang, spa director at the G Spa in the Hotel Gansevoort in the meatpacking district, an alluringly weird hybrid of spa and saloon. At night, the spa is transformed into a nightclub aimed at models and the heirs who pursue them, its massage cabanas converted to bottle-service V.I.P. lounges. But the liquor flows throughout the day as well. This is the rare bar in New York - or anywhere else - where you can belly up for a martini and manicure.

With the help of Tavalon, a Union Square tea purveyor, the G Spa expanded the concept of the cup of tea that customarily greets spa patrons to encompass a rum, mango and peony tea punch; a chamomile-tinged Cosmopolitan; and a Champagne fizz made with a marmalade-ish Korean citron fruit tea. "They're a little guiltless," Ms. Lang said of the tea cocktails. "People think, there's tea in it, so it's not like a real drink. I mean, tea is a tonic."

Yet it was history rather than health that guided the creation of the Cháfariz, a mélange of Portuguese brandy, peach liqueur, fresh fruit juices and seasonally selected teas that made its debut this summer at Alfama, a small Portuguese restaurant in the West Village. It boasts some of the city's most adventurous (and underheralded) cocktails, which make a wide orbit around Portuguese tradition. A co-owner, Tarcísio Costa, who created them, noted that Portugal played a crucial role in introducing tea to Europe, which struck him as good a reason as any to start playing with a cocktail shaker. Conceived as a summer drink, the Cháfariz has achieved such popularity that it has impelled Mr. Costa to hold it over, with black vanilla tea replacing peach tea to lend it some autumnal gravitas.

"Love and scandal are the best sweeteners of tea," the 18th-century writer Henry Fielding wrote. No arguing there, of course, except to add that nothing quickens love and scandal better than a cocktail.