Iced Tea - 901 Reviews

When my ladyfriend was down in NC visiting her sister a few weeks ago, she sent me a message raving about the iced tea that she got at Bojangles (a fast food chicken place down in the bottom states). She also told me that had it bottled and she was going to bring me home some. When I saw it I was relived to find there was no cartoon chicken on the label trying to sell the product. There is something intermittently creepy about a chicken selling out his/her own kind in order to make a few bucks. I just want to grab their little feathers and shake the hell out of them and scream, “THEY ARE KILLING YOUR PEOPLE!” So yeah, good job on that guys.

Unfortunately they did not as good of a job making this tea. After taking a sip, my ladyfriend announced that this was completely different from what she drank in the restaurant. What she described as authentic southern sweet tea had now become a step above sweetened liquid plastic. There are no ingredients or anything listed on the bottle, so I can only assume they melted down some plastic, added some tea powder and a whole mess of sugar and bottled it. This is probably the single worst iced tea I have ever tasted.

Finally, I say. Finally I have found a black currant drink that doesn't taste like a foot. I don't know what other people were doing but seriously everyone. Are you still mushing up fruit with your feet and are you also not washing your feet? Classic. Classic.

In the modern day, we've got machines and...I don't know...steamrollers...that mush up fruits to make juice. Clean things. This company is pretty spot on with everything we've had. This tea is a good, naturally sweetened black tea with a very nice and fruity black currant drink. It is a good split between the flavor and the base that I could drink again and again.

Look, if you've got a small, intimate company that still makes juice with your feet; I would love to drink it as long as you have some sort of FDA related clearance. I don't often care about the FDA but when potentially skuzzy body parts are involved, I might like a little bit of interference of a third party agency.

I love that Granny and the family has started making unsweetened versions of their line of teas. You see I am an adult, and being one means that I no longer require obscene amounts of sugar in my beverages. Sure I drink a lot of sugary drinks to review for this website, but my intake of fluids is mostly water and unsweetened tea that I brew myself. That's good and well for when I am at home/work, but when I'm out gallivanting with my friends it's nice to have unsweetened options that aren't bottled water.

After those accolades I have to say that I'm not sure this was a good flavor to choose for the unsweetened line. Actually, yes it was. It's a good solid drink, but I would definitely purchase one of their other flavors before this. I love mojito flavored drinks, but they are one drink that sugar definitely helps even out. The lime in this distracts from the taste of the actual tea in this bottle. Tea is naturally a little bitter and that coupled with the sourness of the lime is a bit much. Perhaps I would be more prone to purchase this if the fruit flavor was toned down a bit. The mint flavor here is at a great level. It's very subtle, but still noticeable, meaning that it still has a slight mint flavor without tasting like you're drinking tea after brushing your teeth.

Okay, so I praised this, and then I took it down a couple of pegs, confusing I know. Let me set the record straight. I did enjoy this tea. I just feel that a few small changes could make me really love it. Granny, keep doing what you're doing and I'll keep drinking it, enjoying it and always be dreaming bigger.

My friend RJ was talking up a sandwich. He lives in Brooklyn and what he says goes when it comes to food. He's never led me astray before, knows what I like, and is more worldly than I. Therefore, when told me about a Vietnamese sandwich called "bahn mi," I had to find it. I went to a place that was rumored to have one but they removed it from the menu. It would have been awful had the pho and chicken dish not been so good.

The next day, I did a little bit more digging around on the onlines and found another place. I went and they had one fried pork bahn mi left. I grabbed it, noticed that I was a dollar cash short and hate charging for little purchases so I, in true Thirsty Dudes fashion, bought drinks to make it worth my while using my card. One was a drink for a friend and the other was this little dude.

I ate this sandwich, loved it, took a picture which I did later post to Facebook but not with a sepia tone or worn edge or overexposed filter. You're welcome, internet users. The drink, though, the drink...great. It's a sweet, nicely bitter green tea with a maybe honey and maybe barley. Why do I say "maybe?" Well, due to this country not making people learn anything other than French or Spanish and don't start teaching until ninth grade, I don't know Taiwanese. It's cool, though. Trust me. You always have in the past.

Dear fellow scientists, how much longer must we toil under the tyranny of water? Are we not scientists? Are we not the creators, the magic makers? H2O? I scoff at that! I propose we create a new liquid; a superior liquid. I propose to you that we create H10O. It is the power of water times 10! The problem that I am running into is that when I mix ten parts hydrogen to one part oxygen the result isn't even fluid. If it were I think it might kill you. We are scientists though and we can overcome these issues, and let marketing sort out the rest.

My assistant Billy presented this to me earlier. He calls it H10O, but it is not my vision. I guess we can present it to the public as H10O version 1.0. Billy took everyday water and infused ten different vitamins into it. See what he did there? 10? Get it? I was skeptical at first because due to his never ending diet he sweetened it with sucralose. I asked him why he just didn't leave it unsweetened, and he said that no one would want a drink that tasted like water that a multivitamin had dissolved in. To overcome the vitamin and diet flavor he also added a healthy dose of peach and mango flavors. Somehow that covered up the poison sucralose flavor of the drink. I personally hate that stuff and didn't think I could handle more than a sip, but I've downed several bottles since he first brought it to me. It's peach, it's mango, it has zero sugar in it, it's chock full of vitamins, and it doesn't taste like death. This may not be the beverage of my dreams but until one of us can properly take on the beast called science it is what H10O will have to be.

Steve, why did you start brewing the green tea out in the yard? You didn't like the way it made the house smell? Well that is just dumb. Brewing tea smells delicious. In fact I always look forward to coming home from work so I can open up the door and be greeted by that wonderful aroma. Now, my second question; why did you start brewing the green tea out in the yard in the middle of the bee apiary? Oh, that's the only place it would fit where it wouldn't be in the way of your croquet game. I guess that's understandable, but tell me this did you clean the vats out between batches? I mean I know I probably shouldn't have left you in charge for the two months that I was on vacation, but I leave a life of leisure and I need to do that from time to time. The thing is that the bees seemed to have incorporated the vats into their hives and if we want to sell any of this tea we're going to have to filter out the honeycombs and dead bees. Let's just do that and never mention this to anyone else. I just hope the tale of this doesn't end up on some dumb website.

Steve, we've somehow brewed a tea that tastes exactly like Asian green tea. I don't know how to explain the difference between the green tea I brew from a tea bag and the kind you get in a Chinese restaurant, but this is way more like the latter. The bee residue that we filtered out actually gives this a little bit of a honey flavor. I personally like my green tea unsweetened, but I think a lot of people would be into this. It has a medium level of sweetness, which is what many people need for a stepping-stone to the world of unsweetened teas. Your blunder may have actually been a gateway to a healthier America. Good job, son.

Blasted ladyfingers. Why? Why do you have to ruin a perfectly good dessert with rum? You turds. Why? I don't eat things cooked in or with alcohol so when I found out that tiramisu swam in the lake of Cap'n Morgan, I swore off the sweet treat for eternity. Honestly, I never was that crazy about it to begin with so not eating it doesn't really affect me but when I came across this little guy in a wondrous Asian market in Toronto with the Thirsty Dude called Jay, I had to buy it.

This drink tastes like tiramisu. It's odd. Cake flavored drink. Oh, I'm sorry, have you had one before? We've had ice cream flavored drinks, Masala flavored drinks, corn flavored drinks, but never cake. Why not? It seems to not be a problem for these guys. Maybe a chocolate cake tea would be nice. Try it. This tea tastes like the cake it's supposed to. I know it's a novel idea since it's a self-proclaimed "Tiramisu" flavored but we drink stuff all the time that doesn't taste like it's supposed to and this isn't exactly a "regular" drink so it could have gone either way. As far as the "milk tea" thing goes, it's more milk than tea but they're both there. A black tea powder (odd) and a skim milk (not odd) make up the base of this.

Also, it should be pointed out that one carton of this is about as bad for you as a slice of real tiramisu so if you are looking for a replacement, this is it, but if you're looking to save on calories, don't bother and eat real cake. If you've got your jaw wired shut like Kanye West before he felt the need to make up for lost time and never shut up, this is your go-to-guy.

This is one the lightest, and most lightly sweetened teas to ever walk the face of this earth. Did I just insinuate that this tea is sentient? Possibly. For all I know this bottle could sprout legs and it could go on a walkabout. I don't know and I don't care, as I would still drink it. It's a quality black tea that is ever so slightly sweetened with cane sugar and honey. You can taste the honey a teeny tiny bit, but it's enough to add leaps and bounds to the overall flavor. There is only a faint hint of peach. It's more in the aftertaste than the sipping taste. If sentient beverages is the cost of having teas that taste this good, I say let's do it. Sure we'll have a moral dilemma with each sip, but we're humans we adapt to the craziest things.

A few months ago when Dr. B's emailed us to tell us about their microbrewed teas I was very excited. It's no secret that Mike and I love a good tea, and if microbrewing could do to iced tea what it did for root beer, then everyone was in for a good time.

Dr B's obviously cares about the quality of their tea. They took the effort to use quality ingredients and brew them in a special way. By all means this should have been one heck of a beverage. The thing is the company had a lapse in their judgment. They wanted a healthy tea, so they went with a zero calorie sweetener. In that instant all of their hard work went out the window. I understand wanting to have a healthy drink available, but I wish they would have taken it the other way and not added a sweetener at all. There is monk fruit in all their teas and that would have given them a slight sweetness, which is all it would need. Unfortunately they went the Xylitol route and that cold sweetness is the most prevalent flavor in the mix. I really have nothing against natural zero calorie sweeteners, I just think that when companies decide to use them, they should use a smaller amount so it's not so overpowering. This could have been great, but instead it's hard to finish.

Black can. I have never seen it before. It caught both Jay and I off guard when we went to the store once again looking for new stuff. I don't know how Arizona keeps churning out new products. They've got to push out a new product every month or so and only two or three per year I know about. My brother loves Arnold Palmer so much. I don't know how he drinks it. I don't particularly enjoy it. It's a little too diet but that could just be the "Lite" flavor. I know a couple kids like that. I always seem them drinking either the regular or the "Lite" but never these new flavors. Why? It's the same base that you love with some more flavors. Safe flavors, too. Strawberry? Who doesn't like a strawberry iced tea or strawberry lemonade? I say "or" because I don't know which side the strawberry lies on. It's good. Maybe it's like 75% half and half and then 25% strawberry Arizona. You know they're just mixing tubes down there in the factory. It's like a bunch of dudes saying, "Alright bring me the green tea tube and mix it with this pomegranate tube and why don't you bring me over that watermelon tube and we'll see what we can concoct." It's like the Mexican restaurant of drink companies where they only have seven ingredients and somehow manage to make a four page menu.

This is good, though. It still retains a little bit of tea, a little more lemonade, and a decent strawberry taste. Maybe Arnold Palmer was upset that Jack Nicklaus got a strawberry lemonade and he wanted some of the action on that. Those golfers. Always competing. Lay off each other, gents. You guys did pretty well for yourselves in your prime. You've each got a closet of green jackets you can be proud of.

I'm not the mix guy here at Thirsty Dudes. The person you would want to talk to about that is Mike. He loves being a participant in the completion of a beverage. Personally I just want the finished beverage handed to me. Proof of that is that it has more than likely been over a year since Oregon Chai sent us this concentrate and I have yet to try it. Tonight the drink gods decided to shine on the northwestern company because my apartment is freezing and I'm a stubborn so and so that refuses to turn on the heat yet.

The carton tells me to just mix this and milk (almond milk in my case) in equal amounts. I did so and decided to give it a try cold. It's really sweet. So much that the sweetness overpowers the chai-ness and I think I even put in too much concentrate. Every Chai beverage I've ever had has had an overpowering spice to it, but not this. The spiced flavor is there, but it's pretty mellow. After I heated it up the sweetness subsided a bit and it was more balanced out with the spice. The more I drink it the more I realize how much I appreciate the lighthandedness of it. Now I'm a bit warmer and I can sit around reading feeling nicely terrible due to the amount of Indian food Mike and I downed at dinner.

Coconut: -2 points. Red Tea: +1 point. Xylitol: +1 point. Knowledge of the previous one I drank: -3 points. It took me some psyching to actually try this. I thought it was going to blow. The math just doesn't add up to something that is good. Now there is a lot to take into consideration when drinking this. Issue one is that the Xylitol in this drink runs rampant like lava flow through the ancient city of Pompeii. If you don't like this new blend of artificial sweeteners, just steer clear of this entire line because it is quite overbearing. That being said, it did a great job of covering up the taste of coconut. It's a little coconutty but not too bad. If you like coconuts, you might not like this because it's not as coconutty as you would like, I can assure you. It does manage to squeak in a little bit of a decent tea taste in between the violent tongue lashings from the Xylitol.

I hardly gave this drink a proper review but as soon as they get their mix straight and can serve me a proper flavor that doesn't taste like artificial sweetener with a hint of whatever flavor they're calling it, they'll get a decent review. For now, I work with what I have and that's not much.

I thought we had tried every flavor of Arnold Palmer. Then I saw this bottle, in a Fox News store, in the Houston Airport. Ironically just past this store was a PGA tour shop. This isn't my favorite, but the pomegranate is a nice change of pace to be mixed into the classic drink recipe. I wish this didn't have HFCS in it because it makes in unnecessarily thick tasting.

We recently realized that a handful of our friends haven't really hung out in awhile. As a result Saturday afternoon was a dudes hang of gluttony. We started it off with the dirt mall aka flea market where we sifted through piles of people's garbage looking for a clock for Mike whilst eating soft pretzels, hot dogs, cinnamon rolls and a single cannoli. From there we went to look for a coat for Mike deep in the bowels of hell and come up empty handed. Then we went to another circle of hell that is more commonly known as Guitar Center so I could try out an amp that I thought (correctly) that I wanted. The important part came next. We hit up a few Asian markets for groceries and new drinks. I bought such a variety of weird tofu that I couldn't be happier. Our main market also got a new shipment of drinks and this was one of them.

I have no idea what “common selfheal fruit-spike drink” is, but it sounded more interesting than I could handle. As soon as we walked out I ripped this bad boy open and we all shared it. We all decided that it was okay, but that is had a decent licorice aftertaste, and I'm not talking about Twizzler. Along with never hearing of the fruit that is the namesake of this beverage it also contains grosvenor momordica fruit, that I'm sure 99.54% of American have never heard of as well. Along with that there are dates in here. When mixed together these ingredients have a taste that is something between a sweet tea and a flat herbal root beer (minus the wintergreen). At first I thought this was great, but with each sip my interest wanes. BY the end I really had lost all interest in it. From the name I'm assuming that there is some medicinal properties to this drink, but who knows since the label is in Chinese.

After our shopping spree we decided it was time for a yearly trip to the only sit down chain restaurant that is worth a damn: Chilis. Their real food is nothing to write home about, but they have incredible unsweetened blackberry and mango teas. Also the endless chips and salsa are enough for us to go gaga. You should have seen how many baskets of chips we housed. Mama would have been proud.

I had a true taste comparison with this one. As I've previously mentioned Arizona was my gateway into green teas. It was the first I've ever had and for a longtime it was my benchmark. How stupid I was. Last night I went to a show with my friend Dave and he brought a can of the classic Arizona green tea and I brought this bottle of Urban Zen. We were both happily drinking our respective teas when he needed me to hold his for some reason. Being the sneaky so and so that I am I took a sip. Wow, the two drinks while having essentially similar makeups were light years apart. I had never realized how cheap Arizona tasted before. It's essentially a sweetener with some green tea flavoring in it. This on the other hand was the real deal. It's properly brewed whole leaf green tea that has been infused with jasmine flower. It has a real green tea taste, and it's mostly sweetened with honey, which gives it's own twist to the flavor. All in all this has only 10g of sugar in it, which is all you ever really need in a sweetened tea. I'm pretty sure that Arizona has about 4 times that. The comparison made me realize how much of a kids drink Arizona really is, and how this is a tea of a pseudo sophisticated adult. It's slightly bitter with a nice light floral taste. Jasmine tea, it's not just for fancy Asian restaurants anymore. Arizona, I don't know if I'll ever look at your green tea the same way again.

If you've never had the joy of trying bubble tea, let me try and explain it for you. It starts off with a nice black or green tea (I personally always go for the green), then a shot of syrup or powder flavoring is mixed in. These flavors can be all over the map, there are fruits such as kiwi and guava, there is chocolate, there is even taro root. I've never had a flavor that I haven't liked. There are some that are milk based as well, but who really needs to mess with something like that?

One would think that this would be enough to have a nice flavored tea, but one would also be wrong. The true joy of bubble tea is the “bubbles,” which aren't bubbles at all but pearls of tapioca. I understand that it sounds completely disgusting and I was hesitant to try it at first myself, but they are wonderful and incredibly fun. The tapioca balls are fairly flavorless, so they just add a texture and entertainment (they make the best spit balls you have ever seen). The first time I had bubble tea I didn't realize you were supposed to chew the pearls, so like the idiot I am I swallowed them whole and felt terrible afterwards. After a whole lot of mocking from my friends I tried it again and with some chewing I grew to love it. I bet you will too.

Why am I talking so much about this Asian delicacy? Well that would be because this tea tastes exactly like my flavor of choice at my local bubblery. 95% of the time when I get bubble tea I'm going to go with the passion fruit. What can I say? I have a weakness. I was shocked at how much this tasted exactly like bubble tea, which tastes slightly different than just normal flavored tea. It probably has something to do with the way they flavor it. If this had been poured into a glass with some pearls in it and served to me I would never have guessed that it wasn't from a bubble tea place. It's a very sweet green tea, with a flavor that tastes exactly like passion fruit. It's one of my new favorites. Too bad I've only found it at a market in Toronto.

Also, when I was entering the company information for this review I saw that the web address www.bubbletea123.com was listed on the packaging. It's good to know that my taste buds are working just fine.

Nature, I just can't get enough of it. Well, I can't get enough of the awesome woods aspect of nature. I can do without the frozen tundra side of things. Sometimes I need to go out into the woods, like deep down need it to an extent that I know I won't be able to relax and settle down until I surrounded by the green (okay I'm reading Swamp Thing now, so that's a nod to classic Alan Moore with the phrasing). I have no doubt that when I get old I will live out in the country, preferably in the woods. The city is a young man's game and while I love it now, I know I won't want to be here in twenty years. So to the country I shall go.

It's late Fall now and it's getting cold and it's raining all the time. That means I'm going to be stuck inside for a few months without my precious green. I'll burn cut grass candles and pretend it's nice out but it simply won't work. This drink might help a bit though. It's a slightly sweetened yerba mate with the faintest hint of lemon in it. If you're not familiar with yerba mate it's a pseudo tea that has a bunch of caffeine in it. It tastes like everything in the woods was boiled down into a wonderful drink. If I ever had to describe what I think nature would taste like, I would hand the person a bottle of this. It's strong, herbal and wonderful. It's a Brazilian tradition by way of Canada. How does that even make sense? Oh well, here's to hoping we get a few more nice days in so I can go engulf myself in the forest. Then, hibernation.

I don't mean to bum everyone out, but I currently have no grandmothers, as mine have both passed on. It happened a long time ago and I have moved on and learned to live in a grandmotherless world. Now that I've tasted my fourth bottle of this brand of tea I realize I was wrong and this is a plea for Granny Squibb to adopt me as her own so that I can get my fill of her tea any time I so wish. You see it's not available in Buffalo, and waiting for her new flavors to come out so that we can get samples is simply not acceptable.

This tastes like a nice black tea that one of my past grandmothers might have brewed up, except they never would have iced it. It was hot tea or nothing with them. This is chilled and sweetened. If it were just black tea I would have loved it, but the addition of raspberry made it perfect. This may in fact be the best raspberry iced tea I have ever tasted. When a tea actually tastes like it was sweetened with real fruit, you know the company has done well.

So what do you think Madam Squibb, will you be my new grandmamma?

Jay doesn't like lemon drinks. I don't 100% know why but I think it has something to do with how it has the potential to taste a little like Pledge or Pine Sol. I don't get that when I drink lemon stuff and I also don't hate lemon so Jay usually gives them to me. I think he gave me this one and for once his complaint is valid.

This drink is one of the worst lemon green teas I've ever had. It's got a green tea taste that's trying to shine through too much sugar and bad lemon. Reading the ingredients, you don't have to be detective Goren to know that "artificial lemon flavor" is going to blow. There is something else that's pretty bad in there but I can't pinpoint it specifically other than "it tastes like fake everything" like who ever made this drink made a natural version of the drink and mixed in the cheap, regular version of the drink. You can taste what should have been but it's been crushed by the other stuff leaving you with a confused, unsatisfied palate.

Charlie, why do you drink pop all the time? You know that the giant things of tea I make are communal, right? You didn't? Tea is like free. I know we're broke, but tea is my eternal gift to you. I don't even care if you finish it. I enjoy making it, I enjoy drinking it, I would enjoy if you enjoyed it instead of that grocery store cola you're always slamming. I put lemons in it, yes. I don't expect you to cut up lemons like I do if you make it but it's a nice little treat to have a lemon tea. Oh, you need more in there? Well let's spruce it up a little bit. What have we got in the cupboard here. Oh, awesome, mint leaves. I don't know when else I would use these. Let's put these in here, go get something to eat, come back and drink some tea.

A LITTLE BIT LATER...

You know what, Charlie? I don't care what anyone says about McNugget's. I love them and they've always been delicious. Let's get that glass of tea, right? It's pretty good. A little hint of mint and not at all toothpasty. The lemon just kind of adds to the flavor but it's all good. I'm going to have to do this with the mint more often. Thanks, Charlie, for your inspirational recipe additions. Now I know why I keep you around. What? It was a joke. I don't care that you hang around the house all day playing my Xbox, as long as you make rent and bills, you can do whatever you want. We're young. Now is the time to do this. Give me more of that tea. We've got video games to play!