I'm baaaaaack! Since April my life has sort of gone off the rails, and I'm just now finally get around to blogging and other not-work writing. I've got a lot of new teas in the queue for posting!
Today I'm talking about some of the wonderful new bottled iced teas that are generally available. There's so much more choice now than the bad old days of lemon-flavored HFC sweetened Lipton in a can.
Pure Leaf's Tea House collection of bottled iced teas has proven surprisingly good overall. My new favorite is their Strawberry and Garden Mint black tea. The initial flavor is a nice balanced strawberry, not too sweet and without the overly chemical quality found in many bottled fruit teas. The mint is a very strong aftertaste (hardly a hint), but it's quite good -- clean and palate-cleansing. Given a choice between this and any other bottled iced tea, I will buy this one every time.
Honest Tea also seems to be experimenting with upscale brews in glass bottles. I'm very fond of their Peach Oo-La-Long Tea, and not just because it has Opus the Penguin on the bottle. It's a blend of oolong and black tea with organic cane sugar, peach puree, and agave syrup, but it is not strongly sweet like Snapple, etc. It's primarily tea-flavored, with sweetness and peach-ish flavor. I personally would like the tea better if it were more strongly peach (not sweet, as such, but peach). That's not to say that it is bad. I like it. It's just not perfect.
The other Honest Tea I've enjoyed is their Moroccan Mint Green, featuring peppermint, spearmint and honey. Again, it's not perfect. But it's pretty darn good. I would like to be just a tiny amount sweeter because there is an odd almost bitter aftertaste to the mint. That almost-bitterness isn't a problem because it has a clean quality too it that is perfect after eating strongly-flavored foods.
