Iced Tea - 901 Reviews

Everyone knows about the Salem Witch Trials. Women were put through horrible ordeals to see if they were witches or not. The sad thing was most of the time the only way they could tell if someone was a witch was if they survived the ordeal. Oops, over a hundred women were tried and executed via drowning, burning and getting crushed with stones. When a tragedy occurs in most towns, the townsfolk usually try to forget about it, and keep things quiet. Salem decided to take things the other way and they have turned the whole ordeal into a money making machine. There are tours, museums, and souvenirs galore. The Salem Wax Museum even sells a variety of their own sodas as well as this iced tea. I do find it a bit odd that the label has a stereotypical Halloween witch on it, instead of a normal looking townsperson like the people who were tried. That's a little insensitive, but of well. It's a decent lemon iced tea. It's pretty sweet, but in the good way. The lemon flavor also wasn't too over powering. I was shocked to see that it was sweetened with HFCS and not cane sugar, as it wasn't very thick. I enjoyed this a great deal and if I'm ever back in that area of Massachusetts I'll make sure to pick up some more.

"Go green!" everyone says. "It's good for the environment!" they add, rather snobbish. Teas' Tea just couldn't hear it anymore. All day, green, green, green. "Enough!" the CEO said. "We're going to go so green you're going to puke!" When that dude gets mad, he will do whatever it takes to stop. He went into the Teas' Tea workshop alone for an entire weekend. He shut off his phone and told no one to come down until he said it was alright.

Saturday came and went. Sunday came and went. Monday came and went and people were getting worried. No one dared knock on the door for fear of near execution. Tuesday he emerged from the workshop with bottles in his arm exclaiming, "I've done it!" to an empty office. Everyone had gone out for tacos. He took his bottles and put them on everyone's desk so when they returned they had something to drink. They all came back and the intern who was rather thoughtful brought a taco back just in case he was done working. The intern gave him the burrito and the CEO gave him the lowdown on what he was working on.

What he manufactured for almost four days was a green apple and green tea drink that embodied all that was green and delicious. Initially it tastes like a green apple then it kicks in to green tea gear, whatever that gear is. It's not overly sweet and tastes like it gets all its sweetness from the apple even though both cane sugar and Stevia sweeten it. The intern loved it and everyone who tried it came in one by one to agree that it was all the same.

The CEO pushed that product to the people ASAP and people agree; Teas' Tea went green and did it swimmingly.

Well this isn't what I thought it was going to be at all. I'm guessing that I'm not the only one out there that thinks of a combination of iced tea and lemonade when they hear “half & half.” There wasn't an ounce of my being that didn't think this was going to be peach flavored green tea and lemonade in equal increments. Looks like every ounce of my being was wrong. How does it feel to be wrong, self? Oh nevermind, you're used to the feeling.

The truth is there is no lemonade in this drink at all. When Teas' Tea says that it is a half & half, what they mean is that the beverage is half green tea and half peach juice. To be honest I'm glad that I was wrong. This year everyone is going crazy with the lemonade tea combos and I'm getting a bit tired of it. One thing that I will never get tired of is lightly sweetened quality tea, and that is what we have right here. It has the classic Teas' Tea green tea taste juiced up with a heaving amount of peach. They could have just called this peach green tea, because it doesn't taste crazy different than their normal teas. Okay, it is a tad sweeter than their other flavors, but not by much. I guess marketing had to get their grubby hands in there, and they figured calling it something new might catch people's eyes.

Oh, and this trend of companies using cane sugar and stevia because they say it helps bring out the flavor? Cut it out. Luckily with this drink you cant' taste the stevia, but in most of the other ones I've tried the stevia is distracting and takes away from a great beverage.

My good friend and business partner Alex Wrekk went to a brewery in Eugene, OR on her day off yesterday. While she went for the beer, she excitedly called me to tell me about the flavors of soda they also made. Later in the day she surprised me with bottles of two of them! Isn't she the best?!

I've only had one chai soda before, but it's one of my favorite sodas of all time. The smell of this is strong of chai, which is awesome. While I don't drink chai tea as much as I used to, I still love the smell of it. The chai taste isn't as intense as I was hoping, but it's still good. It almost taste like weak grapefruit soda, with a splash of chai.

Since this was made at a brewery, I can only assume by the taste of it that it is a fermented soda. I'm not a huge fan of fermented sodas so that might be throwing me off a bit. They definitely got the 'fizz' part of the name down. This is one of the fizziest soda's I've ever had.

Greg was a troubled teen. He spent a lot of his youth stealing candy and snacks from stores. He never got in any real trouble, as he was a good kid otherwise. He was just a little bit sneaky. Greg would steal a pack of gum or bag of chips or can of pop but nothing worth more than a couple dollars.

One day, he was thirsty and went across the street to get something to drink. He saw a bottle of Martinelli's half and half and thought that it was in a cool bottle and he needed it. He grabbed two off the shelf, put them in his oversized pockets, and walked out of the store. He sat down around the corner and drank a bottle of it. He liked it a lot. It was different because it wasn't so sweet like other iced tea and lemonades. It was an even split, just like how it was advertised. It had a little pulp towards the end, but it wasn't too tart.

He was just about to open the second one and old man Harris, the owner of the store came out and saw him drinking a stolen drink and chased after him. They got around the block and Greg grabbed the bottle like a baseball, which it is in the shape of, and threw it at old man Harris. Harris caught it, yelled at him to stop stealing from the store and walked back. That kind of scared Greg and he only stole a few more times and went straight after that.

Nature's promise is to fill your body with vitamins and minerals that come from nature. Nature does a good job making food and drink. As a matter of fact, it probably does the best job. Technology makes food maybe bigger and faster but that doesn't necessarily make it better as much as it makes it convenient. When nature says something, it means it. Nature doesn't lie. People lie and blame it on nature. Things like "100% Natural" means that it comes completely from nature and that, in my experience, is about five out of ten times true. That's 50% lies. Nature never lies, once again.

When nature wasn't lying, they teamed up with a company that used that phrase as their titular line and made a delicious drink. It's a raspberry white tea. It's not bitter, has a pretty great raspberry taste, and is lightly sweetened. The latter has the keys to my heart because it's an actual relief when something isn't just chocked full of sugar.

Here is where the vegans, namaste-ans, and hipster vegans have a point in that they believe in things that come from the earth and don't really subscribe to things that are "manufactured" and artificial. You guys. You guys and your dreadlocks, fixed gear bikes, patch'd jackets, and 80's secretary glasses. You guys have a point. You have a point about nutrition. Only. Exclusively. Just nutrition. Knock it off with the rest of that nonsense. You girls are wasting your prime years looking like my Jewish Aunt did in 1986.

You gotta free your mind maaaaaaaannnn. Open up your third eye and see the world for what it really is. It's beautiful maaaaaannnnn. You gotta see the trees for the forest maaaaaaan. No maaaaaaan I got it right. It's not “see the forest for the trees,” that doesn't make any sense maaaaaaaaaannnn. You can't have a forest without trees and trees are beautiful maaaaaaaaaaannnnnnnnnn, just like life.

You know what else is beautiful maaaaaaaaaaaaannnnnn? Guayaki yerba mate, that's what. The stuff is delicious. It's so beautiful maaaaaaaaaannnnnn. It's like the trees. They have this one flavor called Pure Mind, and whenever I drink it I just feel like I'm one with the planet. There are these little birds on the label and they are just so beautiful maaaaaaaaannnnn. It has that wonderful earthy, slightly bitter mate flavor to it, but the bitterness isn't really there because it's sweetened and it has all of this beautiful pomegranate juice in it. Antioxidants maaaaaaaaannnnn, now there's a mind trip. This is seriously one of the best tea drinks I've ever tried maaaaaaannnnnn. The thing is maaaaaaaaaannnnn that it doesn't taste overpoweringly like mate or pomegranate. The two just live in harmony like the trees and the forest maaaaaaaaannnnn. That's where the saying comes from anyways. Some shaman drank this tea and thought of the awesome harmony that it contains and creates and just thought of trees and forests, and little birds. You really just need to drink this and free your mind maaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaannnnnnnnnnnn.

Times like this are when my science skills get to shine. What sits in front of me is a delicious honey vanilla chai tea concentrate. There is a whole lot of concentrate in this bottle. The ingredients say that it's enough for eight servings, but I just made a glass, and it barely made a dent in the bottle.

To prove I am a scientist I got out some measuring cups so that I could follow the directions exactly. When it comes to reviewing concentrates like this it's pretty crucial to get it just right, or the favor could be completely off. Yeah, something as simple as that is still science, deal with it. The directions say to mix it with milk or milk substitute. Since I am not proud of my mutant gene that allows me to drink other creature's milk (oh man Professor X would be so disappointed in me) I went with unsweetened almond milk. I also chose to make it the cold way instead of hot, as it's summer and who wants to drink hot tea at 3PM in the blazing hot sun?

So I followed the directions and made myself a nice chilled glass of honey vanilla chai tea, and it is gosh darn delicious. It definitely tastes more vanilla than most chai teas I've had before. You also can taste the honey, which I didn't really expect. If this is what was served to me after I just shelled over nearly $5 at a local coffee shop, I wouldn't be upset or feel cheated. In fact if I didn't know any better I really wouldn't know that it was made from a concentrate. Some of the spices didn't really mix in all that well, and I would get sip that were chock full of clove and cinnamon, but I blame that on my mix of choice. I feel like they may have mixed in better with cow milk. I actually decided to drink a second glass, and I upped the almond milk ratio a little bit, and it turned out more my speed. That's the joy of concentrates, you can make them as weak or as strong as you'd like. Man, I really can't wait to try this hot once the sun goes down.

I love stumbling upon regional "cheap" iced tea lines. I'm not talking about the low class giant jugs, but the kind that comes in little bottles or in cans. I came upon this little guy in a gas station in central Pennsylvania. At first it reminded me of a cheap version of the citrus Sweet Leaf. It was just a little less on the Ecto Cooler side of things. The more I drank the more it reminded me of a really cheap version of that same drink. The citrus lost it's charm and just started to taste generic and well...just there. It's also one of those drinks that uses HFCS, but cuts it with stevia to keep the sugar low. I always find that odd. If you're going to use stevia, why not also use cane sugar? Why only make half the effort? I enjoyed it and for $.89 you can't go wrong. After that first sip I just thought it might have been a nice substitute for the elusive Sweet Leaf.

Oh, I had left some in the can, and when I went to finish it about an hour later into my drive it was warm and absolutely disgusting. Make sure you drink this nice and cold.

Seriously folks, how many flavors does Arizona have? I feel like more and more pop up all the time, but then I remember them being around briefly years ago, then I'm shocked that we haven't already reviewed them. This is our 29th review of an Arizona product and it also officially makes it the most reviewed company we have (Cintron has 28 reviews). That's a lot of products for one company, and I'm sure there are a couple out there that we have still missed. After 29 reviews I can say one thing with certainty; If they had used cane sugar instead of HFCS in all of their drinks, they would probably be my favorite drink company of all time. Sure they used it in the Black & White Tea, but it's so rare that I can find it now, that it barely counts.

To make this drink you take 8 parts Arizona original green tea and add 2 parts pomegranate flavored concentrate. Even at that low of a ratio the syrupiness of the pomegranate is all I can taste, unless I really concentrate and try to find the green tea in there. Rereading that makes it sound really gross, well I guess it is in theory, but I kind of like the way this tastes. I like the way pomegranate tastes, and while I could do with more tea flavor, for the price you can't really complain.

So many nights. So many nights were spent with Jay and/or my friend RJ skating downtown, sitting on a curb drinking Arizona green tea tall boys just watching the world pass by. Those were good times. We'd be over someone's house and go to a place called "We Never Close" that we called "Weiner Close" because some appropriate lights were out for an extended amount of time and get can after can of this. It was the entry to a world of new drinks. While everyone else was drinking Brisk, you were drinking something with ginseng and honey in it. This was innovative to the drink line. Green tea? I've had black tea before and if you're from the South, you've had sweet tea but sweet green tea? That's just crazy. Arizona killed it with this one and they probably, hopefully still do.

It's held up in it's ability to remind me of a time when I was hanging out with friends having a wonderful time. I've certainly had better teas since those days but I will never dismiss Arizona as being an influence to what different types of tea can be on the market. I now drive past that corner I used to sit on as an early twenty-something and I won't soon forget just sitting there, sitting, talking about music and stuff. It was something I looked forward to. It was when things used to be a little bit slower than they are now. Oh to be back there now. A lot has happened in ten years.

As for a review: You've had it, you know. I was blown away when I saw that we hadn't reviewed this before. I feel that I owe Arizona an apology for not drinking and reviewing this sooner. Everyone loves it. Arizona; You're fine. Keep up the good work. I'm sure there are countless stories like this in different parts of the country all around this epic drink.

I've been sitting on my computer for the past four hours working on a new project. Within that time I have listened to predominately electro-pop like Tesla Boy, Anoraak, Brookes Brothers, and Skinny Puppy "Remission," which could not be further from electro-pop. I'm in a fantastic mood and that's also considering I took ten minutes to walk down the street to see a car chase gone wrong with a criminal crashing into a tree and a cop car crashing into someone's front porch. I'm in the zone (chief) and I could stay up all night and get a good portion of this project done and over with if it wasn't for my better judgment and assumption/guarantee that my son will wake up between 7:30 and 8 in the morning and I will be drained all day.

As I'm working, I'm working on this iced tea. I was stoked to see this in the smaller bottles today instead of those gargantuan, thirty-plus ounce bottles. I had no choice but to fork over a buck and a half and get it. I took one sip and my glee promptly turned into disappointment. Why? Simple. Lipton forgot to add the watermelon. I was so excited to try a watermelon green tea but Lipton, in their haste, forgot to put the watermelon flavor in this. It's got a decent green tea taste and I commend that. It does taste a little diet, which is good considering this is a diet drink sweetened exclusively with sucralose and that stuff is grozz. I have eaten watermelon on numerous occasions and I've got to say that this drink is simply lacking that flavor.

I understand that the two is harsh, but it's partially a punishment for getting my hopes up with the promise of watermelon green tea and also the fact that all the flavors of this line of tea have been great. Bottom rung.

Since we intake so many calories from consuming drinks all the time, I have actually come to look forward to diet drinks. 80% of the time they taste horrible, but every once in a while you'll find one that surprises you. This is one of those instances. Usually diet iced tea is really gross and tastes like a barrel of chemicals. Somehow Snapple has managed to keep the toxic taste out of this half and half. I have a feeling the lemonade might have something to do with it, but I'm not complaining.

As a half and half, this is just "okay". It's not the worst, but it's far from the best. It's middle of the road. Medicore, so-so, or any other way you want to put it.

Captain, we have a problem. We're about to set voyage and we just realized that we only have enough beverages on this ship to last us until tomorrow. I don't know who messed up, but we'll find out and they will be scrubbing the galley in no time.

Sailor, first things first; I am an admiral, not a lowly captain. I control entire fleets of ships, and I eat captains with my morning granola. That's right, cannibalism is okay because I am an admiral. It will do you well not to forget that in the future. As for our little problem, don't sweat it ensign. Being an admiral and all I have the inside line to many things that you lower sailors do not. One of them happens to be a line of teas created for my kind. That's also right; us admirals like to think of ourselves as a different race. We are descended from mermen, but you didn't hear that from me. I can get us as many cases of tea as we'll need for this voyage by 0900 tomorrow.

Have you ever had Arizona and Peace Tea before ensign? Well, tea made for admirals falls somewhere between the two. It tastes more like Razzleberry Peace Tea, but it is sweetened with HFCS, so it has more of the consistency of Arizona. You might ask why they don't use a higher grade of sweetener for the master sea race. The fact of the matter is that our kind really just likes the thickness of corn syrup. It makes us feel like a drink has more substance. Call us crazy, but that is how my kind has always felt and always will feel.

Now let's get these people down to Cozumel. They paid decent money for this cruise and we're going to show them the best time we possibly can!

Welcome back to another episode of “Board Room Shenanigans.” As always we are brought to you by the three lovely fellows at Thirsty Dudes. This series helps to fill in the gaps as to why certain drinks taste like they do. Sometimes you have to wonder how some drinks make it onto the shelves. Here at the show we like to think we shed some light on the subject. Now onto today's episode…€¦.

Gentlemen, the world of energy drinks is shifting and I will not see our empire crumble because we did not get with the times. Consumers are demanding more than just candy flavored sparkling drinks that will keep them up all night. As our competitors have proven the clients want real flavors and new styles. I thought we would be alright since we put that relaxation drink on the market, but people still want new energy drinks. What are everyone's ideas? Juice infused with whatever it is that gives our drinks energy? Well first off, as a member of this board you really should know what those ingredients are. We don't need a scandal on our hands. Secondly, do you think I want to hemorrhage money? Do you know how much fruit juice costs in comparison to the sugar water we put out now? There's no way we could do that and keep our profits high. Energy shots? Those are so last year. Energized iced tea? I think you may be onto something! That's something new and tea can be the cheapest thing ever. Let's take it up a notch though, so people think they are getting a little extra for their money. Let's make it peach iced tea.

In order to keep costs low we're going to need to use the ghettoest tea ever. You know those gallons of tea you can find in gas stations for 99 cents that are more sugar water than tea? Well, we need to use something like that, but make it even more peach flavored sugar water and less tea. We'll mix all of that up with our patented energy mix, which off the record I think tastes like toxic waste and we have a new product on our hands that the kids will eat up. Non-carbonated energy drinks are going to be the wave of the future and we're going to be riding the crest. Who cares if our product will taste like garbage? It's so new that people will eat it up and by the time they realize just how gross it is, we'll be sold out and have a new product on the market.

It has been in the 90's and 100's the past week in Portland. This is very unnatural for Portland, and it sucks. I hate the heat, which is why I moved here. All I've been doing is sitting in front of a fan and drinking water. I decided to venture out into the sun today and found this lemonade tea at a corner store I don't frequent much. Hubert's has never done me wrong so this was a good thing to stumble upon.

Now I'm a big fan of half and half's and I've tried a good number of them in my day. It's hard to get the tea to lemonade ratio perfect, but Hubert's did a damn good job. The lemonade is sweet and tangy, but still lets the mellow green tea flavor come through. If this was more widely available it would be my go-to half and half.

I have a couple of questions for you. How many of you would drive an hour and a half for a couple of veggie dogs from a street vender? How many of you would drive an hour + to get burritos? I have done the prior more times than I am proud of, and I did the latter for the first time yesterday. I'd say it was worth it. My burrito was delicious and huge and it put me in a food coma for a couple of hours. To make myself feel better about the trip I stopped by a deli/market and bought a couple of drinks.

I was very excited to see a new flavor of Argo, especially in Western New York, where there are no Whole Foods. Even though I had negative room in my stomach (I believe it was stretched as much as humanly possible from the gigantic burrito I had just ingested) it was over 95 degrees out and I was parched. I cracked this bottle open and took a sip. It definitely tasted different than I expected. I decided that I liked it though. A couple of minutes later I tried it again and decided I was mistaken the first time around. I sealed up the bottle for later consumption.

I think I've been wrong about hibiscus all these years. I had one drink with it that I really loved, and I'm now thinking that it was something else in that drink that grabbed on to my heart and shook the hell out of it. I don't dislike hibiscus, but every time I drink something with it in it now, I miss the spices from the original tea. Also, upon drinking this I am reminded that I am not a big sangria fan. I think it's the orange juice mixed in with the berries and apples that throws me off. If you mix that all together, it doesn't meet the delicious expectations that lived in my head (my fault not the drinks).

I've gone back to the drink, and I like it more than I did on the car ride home, because I've accepted that it's not what I thought it was going to be. In reality it tastes exactly how hibiscus and non-alcoholic sangria really taste (elderberries, apples, rosehip shells, strawberries, kiwi, raspberries and orange juice), and not how I wish they tasted.

I don't mean to bring up old stuff, but the South lost again. The battle of sweet tea is a battle filled with casualties and here is yet another poor soul that just can't make the cut.

Is it too much to ask that the simplest concoction ever created be made right? Black tea and sugar. Done. If you need to put preservatives in there in increase shelf life, I'm cool with that. Once you start mixing all sorts of other garbage in there it starts to go downhill. Corn syrup will never be an ingredient in a good quality sweet tea. This drink tastes like if you ordered a tea at a restaurant, didn't know that it was unsweetened, and then poured miscellaneous sugar packets into it. One of the final ingredients in this is sucralose and you would think that you would not be able to tell but you can. You know that strange aftertaste? That's the sucralose, detective.

Arizona and Admiral. You know better than that. Why let me, a self-described stupid idiot, teach you how to make a drink? You are drink companies and should know the lay of the land. I'll give you this one for free.

A few years ago Snapple switched over to their “All Natural” line. I was completely stoked because it wasn't that long before then that I discovered that HFCS played a key role in causing the hell that went on in my stomach every night. I probably ingested far more bottles of the new teas than any one human should. It wasn't too much later that I started to see these cans pop up in gas stations. They were about half the price of the glass bottles, so I was understandably interested in them. I quickly realized that while the glass bottles were sweetened with cane sugar, the cans still used HFCS. I never understood why that was. I can't imagine that cane sugar is that much more expensive, since a bunch of other companies use it and keep their prices low. Perhaps some people (I'm looking at the folks from the UK) actually preferred the HFCS version and complained. I will never understand that.

This flavor is what companies want you to think that green tea tastes like. In reality it is reminiscent of green tea you would brew at home in only the most distant of ways. There is so much “sugar” in this that it tastes more sweet than anything. It tastes less like green tea than the Arizona tall boys do. If you're just in the market for an inexpensive sugary drink, perhaps you'll like this. If you're actually a fan of green tea I would probably skip over this one and grab one of the Snapple All Natural teas instead.

Once again with a drink, I am of two minds. On one hand, this is a great iced tea. It'ss organic, sweetened really well with agave, and has a really nice flavor. And unlike a lot of sweetened iced teas, the sugar (or agave in this case) doesn't overpower it so you can still taste the tea. I must say, it is damn good tea. I don't think I've ever had guayusa tea before, but it's delicious.

So what's wrong with it do you ask? Despite the name, it doesn't taste like cherry or ginger. This is a shame because I was really looking forward to the ginger. I can't pinpoint, but it's still good. This, my friends, is the only reason this is getting a 3 instead of a 4, false advertising.