Tuesday, May 27, 2014

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.

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