Bottled Iced Tea: Inko's Blueberry White Tea

At long last I have found a bottled iced tea that is not overly sweet.  Inko's makes a couple of different kinds of bottle white teas.  Yesterday I sampled their Blueberry White with pleasant results.

Inko's Blueberry White was nicely bodied, although not as strong as a black iced.  It had enough of a bite to let me know I was drinking tea.  Most of the sweetness came from the white tea itself and the very light blueberry flavors.  The tea contains fructose crystals, but not the dreaded High Fructose Corn Syrup that renders so many things undrinkably awful.   The blueberry is balanced to the strength of the tea.

I will definitely try the rest of Inko's bottled white teas based on its Blueberry White.

Bottled Iced Tea: Sweet Leaf Citrus Green Tea

I always make a point of looking for bottled iced teas that contain sugar rather than High Fructose Corn Syrup or artificial sweeteners.  Today's find was from a company called Sweet Leaf, which has a line of bottled iced teas found in Supermarkets With Pretensions (Kings, Wegmann's, etc.).

I decided to try the Citrus Green Tea because the other options in the store today were a tea/lemonade blend and sweet tea, neither of which I like.

Unfortunately, this tea suffers from the all-too common sin of being far too sweet for my taste.  It's sweeter than similar products from Lipton or Snapple.  I don't taste citrus -- I simply taste sweet.  Tea is supposed to have at least a little bitter bite.  It's not supposed to taste like Kool Aid.  I found this bottle about as off-putting as my one ill-fated attempt to drink real Texas sweet tea.  I managed to finish the bottle only by cutting it with my unfinished, cold, and slightly stale morning cup of English Breakfast.   Doing so only improved the taste, which is never a good sign.[1]

I will not be purchasing this flavor again, but I'm willing to give other flavors of Sweet Leaf a try (within limits).


[1] In one of those moments of Shark Pit legend, +Jeff Berry mixed Bodine's Twisted Tea (another vile concoction whose sole virtue was the amusement value of the awful faces people made after consuming it) with cold stale black coffee, and found that it only improved the flavor of both.   I thought fondly upon this moment as I poured half a bottle of Sweet Leaf Citrus Green Tea into the dregs of my morning cuppa, complete with Lynyrd Skynyrd song playing on my mental soundtrack.

Tea Tasting: Lipton's Blackberry Vanilla Herbal

Lipton is attempting to upscale its tea, and is now offering herbal teas in trendy little silk sachets.  At this time of year, I go through herbal tea bags like napkins in order to maintain a supply of iced tea in the house.  So I figured why not try Lipton's Blackberry Vanilla Herbal.

I'm pleased to report that it's not awful.  It's not amazing.  But it's perfectly adequate for making iced tea that will be quickly consumed over the course of a long weekend.  It's primarily a fruity flavor with a fruity aroma.  The vanilla comes out as an aftertaste rather than as part of the main flavor.  I would have blended it differently, mixing the vanilla so it works in concert with the fruit flavors.  Even so, it does all right for a cheap commercial herbal.

Putting in extra sweetener is a mistake.  Adding sugar turns an adequate brew into a nasty bit of "bug juice" like what they used to serve at camp.

Bad Tea Chronicles: Snapple Straight Up Tea

Snapple is testing a new product -- it is called "Straight Up Tea."  It claims to be lightly sweetened, using sugar, with no flavoring.  It is, in a word, repulsive.

It is too sweet to be a good unsweetened tea.  Although Snapple claims to have used sugar and actual tea leaves, this atrocious brew does not taste at all like tea sweetened with sugar.  It tastes like bad off-brand iced tea mix.  There is none of the refreshing slightly bitter tang of tea.  It's got a waxy and chemical mouth feel, almost what I'd imagine licking a freshly polished coffee table feels like.

I would drink Snapple Straight Up Tea again if the other choices were human blood or a slow death from thirst.  Although even then, only reluctantly.

Tea tasting: Ice Wine Tea

While in Canada this weekend, I picked up ice wine flavored black tea.  Ice wine is a type of sweet dessert wine made from grapes still frozen on the vine.

The tea is delightful tasting. A flavor akin to sweet white wine is layered over the black tea.  However, the aroma is a little too floral for me.   Even iced, it has a strong floral smell.   I'll finish the box, but I won't seek out this brand again.  I'm curious whether another brand might be less flowery.

Tea Tasting: Harney & Sons' Jane's Garden Tea

I have a whole bunch of new teas to sample and discuss, so there should be more frequent blog posts over the next several weeks.

This tea was a gift, purchased for me because part of the proceeds go to the National Breast Cancer Foundation.

Jane's Garden is a green tea with rose petals.  Based on my past experience with rose-scented and -flavored teas, I was skeptical.  Fortunately, this is a far better rose tea than the previous ones I had tried.  The scent is calming, rather than overly sweet.  While the taste is sweeter than the usual green tea, it's not overly floral and has some grassy tones too.

Tea thoughts

"Americans think we Brits drink tea because we’re polite and genteel or something, whereas we really drink it because it’s a stimulant and it’s hot enough to sterilize cholera bacteria."  -- Charles Stross

Tea Tasting: Cuppa Cake Tea Lemon Chiffon

Apologies for the long silence.  Life happens.

Today's tasting is from the Cuppa Cake Teas line made by Republic of Tea: Cuppa Cake Tea Lemon Chiffon.   It bills itself as caffeine-free green rooibos with lemon, vanilla and coconut.

I'd never heard of green rooibos.  After doing a little research, I found that "green" rooibos is rooibos treated according to the same method as green tea leaves.  I like it far better than the usual red rooibos, which I find has an unpleasant chalky undertone.

The Lemon Chiffon is an odd tea.  I know what it wants to be -- a sort of liquid lemon meringue pie.  It does and doesn't quite achieve that.  There's something missing, at least for me.  There should be a richer, more golden flavor here.  It's one of the few teas that I find needs a little bit of sweetening in order to achieve its best flavor when I drink it hot.  If iced, the flavor profile tends more towards the coconut and I don't need sweetener.

All in all, my jury is still out on this tea.  I want to experiment with adding some agave syrup or other kinds of sweetener and see how those play out.