Iced Tea - 901 Reviews

There was a time in my life where I had to do the “weekend dad” thing. No I wasn't the dad myself, I had to go and stay with my father every other Friday and for the full weekend on the opposite weeks. That was a long time ago. As soon as I was old enough to ride my bike places I was hardly ever at his apartment, except to sleep. I think I was 16 when I stopped going at all. It just seemed pointless and his place was one big cloud of smoke that made me feel like butt soup. There's no real point to tell you that except that in the center of that smoke hole is where I first encountered Arizona tea. MY stepmother became obsessed with it and I remember waking up early one Sunday and drinking one of them. Being as I was probably 15 at the time it blew my mind. Before that the only iced teas I had tasted were Nestea and powder mixes. Arizona opened up a whole new world to me and I quickly became obsessed with iced tea. That obsession lasts to this day, and while Arizona is no longer my favorite, I still have a soft spot for it in my heart.

The other day I went to the store to stock up on “normal drinks” that we hadn't reviewed yet, and I was shocked to discover that we had yet to review this classic Arizona flavor. It used to be the flavor I would treat myself with. I always went for the cans because of their lower price, but to this day I have never seen this flavor in a tallboy. I'm pretty sure it never existed. So sometimes I would cough up the extra sixty cents and go to flavor town. This bottle holds 3oz of tea less than the tall boy cans, but for some reason it seems enormous. That's really what you go to Arizona for; the quantity of tea plus it's slightly above average quality.

There are two things that make this tea stand out amongst the others: they use white tea to make it and it has actual blueberry juice in it. Both of those things step up the game. The white tea makes it taste softer while you can really taste the blueberries. If they had made it with cane sugar instead of HFCS this would be a complete slam-dunk. Unfortunately they don't and the taste suffers a little from the overly sweet syrupiness.

To think if it weren't for bizarre furniture that folded out into a sleeping compartment I wouldn't have had the pleasure of meeting Arizona until a few years later. Where would I even be now in my life?

Back in 1997, "You go girl!" was such a big phrase that a company used it as their name. Go Girl was formed with women in mind. What do women need? Calcium and energy and a proprietary blend of secrets called "Super Citrimax." women crave these things and they don't even know it. Well, no one wants to get osteoporosis, hence the calcium. I guess the need for energy is pretty self explanatory, too. The Citrimax though, like I said, it's proprietary.

Women, the delicate flowers of the human species, need a flavor that matches their personality and what better accompaniment than the soft flavor of a peach.

What Go Girl doesn't tell you is that inside this feminine can resides a pretty basic, diet tasting peach tea. Although Yerba Mate is included in the package, you have none of the bitterness but you might get some of the energy. Halfway there, I suppose.

Go Girl is doing good things for good people but fall short since it almost uses all-natural ingredients. Sucralose was never found on any tree or bush I've ever seen. I'm no horticulturist, but I know a thing or two about artificial sweeteners.

Go Girl? You go girl...to re-research a better blend of an all-natural, peach, Yerba Mate tea.

Half this review is factual. You guess which half.

Summer time is getting closer and closer and to the South, that means one thing...I think. That thing is peaches. The South loves peaches. They put them in everything: salad, soup, drinks, desserts, and everything in-between. I think only snacks are in-between but you get it. Everything. They eat them every which way, too. Deep fried, au naturale, salted, sugared, grilled, sautèed, and pureed. They also juice them.

I feel like this drink is the closest I will get to a sweetened Peach tea, authentic sweet tea with authentic peaches. That's a nice change to the already perfect sweet tea. Even though this tea is made in New Jersey, I feel that some of the upper management, you know, the guys with the hats and giant cigars, were from the South. Imported to NJ from their homeland with the promise of jobs, money, home, chances, opportunity, etcetera. They certainly did find it, though. They found a company that tastes wonderful and also tastes like home. They found two simultaneously great things at the same time. Both Southerners and Northerners have to agree that is a wonderful thing. Bipartisan support!

Western Pennsylvania is Tea Cooler Country. There are more dairies there that produce non-brewed iced teas than I have ever come across anywhere else. I must say that they are all delicious. Most companies that make teas like this overly sweeten them with HFCS to a point that it seems like it's flavored sugar water and not tea at all. PA knows how to do it correctly.

I would really like to visit one of these dairies. I wonder if it would be interesting, or just a bunch of barns filled with cows hooked up to those weird hose things. They are proof that technology can be terrifying. Other ways that technology is terrifying is that this drink is made with "instant tea solids." It just doesn't sound right. It sounds like it should be chunky and completely disgusting, but the drink is completely liquid and delicious. Sure it's on the very very sweet side of things, but it's a tea cooler and that is how they are supposed to be. What I found to be surprising about this drink is that it actually tastes like raspberries and not the weird sweet syrupy fake raspberry flavor that a lot of teas have. Well done Schneiders. I think Mike works for one of your relatives. Well Zach, are they your kin?

If logic means anything anymore than the Mate Fusion company has a stockpile of syringes. It's the only logical way I can think of them getting this beverage to taste the way it does. I'm not talking about using said syringes for drug use; well actually I don't know anything about the employees of the company. Maybe some of them do enjoy spiking a vein every now and then before brewing some tea. How am I to know? I think the employees, sober, high or drunk brew up huge vats of yerba mate tea. Once it's ready they fill the syringes with the tea and then inject it directly into nearly overripe peaches. They shoot so much tea into the fruit that it almost bursts. Then they let the peaches sit for a twelve-hour period before dumping them in a giant juicer that filters out the pits, skins and chunks. All that is left is what you find in this bottle. It's bitter yerba mate tea mixed with some nicely ripened peaches. Just picture biting into one of those tea infused peaches before it goes into the juicer. So much sticky juice/tea would pour down your face and it would be delicious. I just hope they properly dispose of those needles. We don't want an epidemic on our hands.

Hazel, your breath is terrible. I'm sorry. My darling, I love you. I really do. We've been together for a solid two months and I have to be honest; it's often hard to talk to you. I'm sorry. I am. I want to be the man you want and I hope that man is if one thing, honest. I am an honest man, my sweet. For that reason I have to tell you the truth. The truth is that I love you and your breath smells.

I don't want you to change because I love you for who you are and that includes your stank breath so I've brought you something. Do you know how you like unsweetened tea? I've bought you unsweetened tea. Not just any unsweetened tea but mint unsweetened tea. That should help combat that pesky halitosis. It's not too minty, either so you don't have to worry about drinking mouthwash. Another wonderful thing is that it's a concentrate so you've got so many glasses of this stuff coming your way. It's got a decent green tea taste with just a hint of mint to fight your paint peeling breath.

You understand? I'm so happy, my darling. I only want the best for us and I've been thinking about this for quite some time. You are a wonderful person and I wish us the best of luck in the future. I've made you a gallon of tea and I recommend you start drinking it now.

Mark and Jeff had been lost at sea for about a week. They had rented a nice little sailboat to go out and chill out in the tropics for a day, just enjoying the ocean. Things were going well, and then suddenly the winds kicked up and it was too much for our beginner sailors. If it wasn't enough for the wind to blow them off course, it decided to be a real jerk and also blow away their map. It really wouldn't do them any good anyways as each had assumed the other knew how to use a compass. The first few days they fought, but after that they kind of fell into a nice routine. Luckily they had fishing poles with them, so they would catch their food in the morning and then just lounge in the sun during the afternoon waiting for rescue.

It was during one of their afternoon sun bathing sessions that Jeff announced that he really had a hankering for a nice Arnold Palmer. Mark said he thought he say a box of tea under the deck. He had no idea why it was there, as there was no stove, but he never really questioned it. He just took some tea bags put them in a jar filled with water and let it sit in the sun for a few hours. Then he took the lemon that was inexplicably on the boat and squeezed it into his brew. The result was okay, but it was hardly an Arnold Palmer. It really tasted more like a lemon tea with more lemon than one would typically want. It didn't have the zing of lemonade. Jeff held back his complaints while he drank his mediocre beverage. He just sat back and sipped as the sun bronzing his skin.

What I would like to know his how our friends cooked their fish and where did all of this fresh water come from? I smell witchcraft!

Oh, no. I don't want to do this to Hansen's again. I really like a lot of their products but I have to do this. I owe it to myself so that I may sleep at night and the public since I am the messenger. People come here for professionally written reviews about products the world loves. This, though...phew. What a dump of a drink. It is a liquid. This is true. It tastes like some garbage, diet powder mix drink. Now, I've had some of those that are good, but this would not be one of those. I'm not 100% on Acai's bus. I'm half way out the door with the driver pushing me in so that he can get me, and my fellow riders, to our destination on time. Don't push me, bus driver. I'm not ready to give in, yet. This drink is bitterly sweet like Acai drinks are but, man, uber-sweet and uber-diet.

This is an abomination of a black tea. Black tea should sue Hansen's for the slander that is this drink. As soon as this hits my mouth I am in terror. Diet. Bleh. I've drunk Spenda drinks before but this might take the cake as being some of the worst I've ever had. There are light years of distance between "sugar free" and "unsweetened" and if you don't know that, you should get out of the game and enjoy something else.

Hansens. You know I love you. I love many of your products. If you could remove this and that pineapple drink that I hated from your line, I would give you the highest reward of plugging the daylights out of you, until then, justice.

There is so much sugar in everything. Everyone is getting so fat that Coke just made a "responsible" size so that people aren't just drinking giant, twenty ounce bottles all day. It's nuts. People should have the self control to know that enough is enough. Just because you have twenty ounces available, doesn't mean that you need to drink twenty ounces. I'm not calling you fat but I am saying that you should watch what you eat because you're getting a bit portly. That's nicer, right?

This is a step in the right direction. There are two servings but at thirty-five calories a service, I'll slam this whole bottle and not look back. All the walking around the office I do, I probably burned them up. Up and down the stairs and back and forth from one desk to another probably nixed those bad boys. Can you tell I know nothing about nutrition or fitness?

The tea itself is a simple, black tea. Lightly sweetened with no bite, but a clean, black tea. This is like a tea you could make at home. That simple. It's done well, though and you get the feeling that you're doing all right for yourself. This drink is the raise you earned for hard work. This drink is the A+ on that tough Economics 101 test you just did. This drink is the clean car you get after a car wash. It's a good feeling. This is good and I got it for a steal at a local discount store. Could I ask for more? I submit that I could not.

Arnold Palmer has a lawyer, right? I would hope he does for being a famous golfer and all, but more than that I hope he has a team of crack lawyers to make sure he gets his fair share of every lemonade/ice tea hybrid that is on the market. Everyone knows the combo as being an “Arnold Palmer” so I hope the man gets his cut. I hope his legal team is also good enough to get him “royalties” from all of the fringe flavors. Traditionally the drink is lemonade mixed with black tea, but in reality it could be any type of tea. By switching the tea type, does that make it not an Arnold Palmer anymore? Would say mixing it with a green tea make it a Robert Palmer? I hope not, because that guy is terrible. His cover of “Bang a Gong” is one of the worst things I have ever heard. For the sake of this review I will say yes. I will also say that this drink is in essence a Robert Palmer with some strawberry added. I wish this wasn't a Robert Palmer, because besides hating the man I think the lemon juice in this is too distracting. The ratio is completely off and it overpowers the tea flavor, not to mention the strawberry. The first sip I took of this had a great strawberry taste to it, but the more I drank the less berry I got and the more the lemon Gestapo took over. There is also something very plastic tasting about this. I think it's the combination of the bottle and the lemon juice. It just doesn't taste right.

Oh! I got it! Let's make an Arnold Palmer with white tea and we can call it the Leiland Palmer. Also, if you take that and add some blueberry to it, it becomes a Laura Palmer. You know…€¦because she's dead…€¦wrapped in plastic.

I may have mentioned this before, but there is a major plot hole in the film Smokey and the Bandit. The whole premise of the movie is that Big (and Little) Enos hire/bet Bandit to drive to Texas and return with a truck full of Coors. Bandit gets Snowman to drive the truck, while he drives a Trans AM and speeds ahead to lure the cops off of the truck. It's a great concept for a movie except for one thing. They are driving through the southern heat and arrive right at the party, and it is a standard semi truck, it's not refrigerated. That means all of these people are stoked to be drinking hot beer. So gross, but other than that it's flawless.

I personally think with all of the great tea companies in Texas (Sweet Leaf and True Brew) they would have been better off bringing some great tea for everyone to enjoy. Okay, that wouldn't make for a very good party, but I would have loved it.

So yeah, I had a very positive outlook on tea from Texas so when I saw that a great company like Peace Tea had a Texas style tea I was floored. Unfortunately it's not very special. It tastes like they took a batch of their southern sweet tea and cut it with some regular black tea. They really could have called it sweet tea or just iced tea and I would have believed it. I don't know what about it makes it Texas style. It's a decent tea, but nothing special. Tea like this is not worth Bandit's time, no matter how much Big Enos will pay him.

In my world this is a classic standard in Western Pennsylvania. Whenever I'm heading down to Pittsburgh, like I am now, I always pick up a few bottles. In my younger years I definitely liked it a lot more than I do now. I will always have a soft spot for it in my heart, but to be honest it's really nothing special. It's made with instant tea powder instead of brewed tea, and it's sweetened with high fructose corn syrup. That on it's own makes it fairly standard fare for cheap local gas station "tea." What gives Marburgers a little bit of an edge is that they flavor it with raspberry juice solids. I don't know why they would cheap out on the tea in order to use real juice, but it does improve the flavor. It tastes like "ghetto" tea with a highly potent (nearly harsh) natural raspberry flavor. It's a strange combination, but that's probably what keeps me coming back for more.

A couple things. First, we were all very busy this weekend. Jay has been on tour with Cheap Girls and hanging with some other friends in and around, Baltimore, Philly, New York, and beyond. I spent all weekend riding a motorcycle in a basic riding course. Derek has opened a store and is dealing with that. We were very busy. From Jay and I, we're sorry that we didn't get to do any reviews.

Second, and this is a doozy: buy this tea. I'm telling you. I saw it at some small Asian market with my dogg (note the double "G") Jay. I think Jay was looking around for carp juice or shark drink or something to hopefully make me throw up. Notice a pattern? He's always trying to make me throw up. We'll get there, buddy. We'll get there. This tea, which came out of nowhere, is way too good to be stuck in such limited quantities on a dusty shelf in some suburban Asian market. This trumps most big brand iced tea by far. Good natural tea taste and a good natural pomegranate taste. These guys nailed it.

South Korea, you've given me years of Tae-Kwon-Do and now you've given me this. I hope that this review can bring you the income needed to build that new bridge or skyscraper you've always wanted.

I drank this for a long time and out of nowhere just stopped. I don't know what happened, probably nothing, but then I just stopped. Then I read that unfortunate article in either Men's Health or Maxim that put this drink in the "Do not drink" column versus something that has fewer calories. That being said, this has an abominable amount of calories. If you have an element of self-control, you will be fine. Half this and you're at a standard bottle of pop. Naturally, if you drink the whole thing because you're thirsty or weak you will ingest 240 calories. Vicious.

I do love this drink, though. It tastes nothing like green tea and everything like mint...something. If you took all the bite out of green tea, added sugar to cut it down even more, and then a secret ingredient that I think tastes like mint but half of the people that say that to disagree. Look I'm wrong about a lot of things a lot of the time and can accept this, but I have always thought it was minty.

This stuff rules. Drink it with a friend and don't get chunky together.

Memorial Day weekend just wrapped up. It was three days filled with hangouts and barbeques, as those are the perfect ways to remember things. The last party of the weekend was a pool party at some friends' house. I think only one person actually ended going into the pool but the rest of us ate more than our fair share of food, including my new favorite thing “Cowboy Caviar.” Just look it up, it's delicious.

I brought this bottle of tea to share at the party, because I didn't want to end up drinking it all myself. As it turns out I think I am the only one who drank any of it, and it was only one glass. It doesn't really taste like a half and half. It's more of a lemon tea, and cheap tea at that. It actually has lemon juice concentrate in it, but the lemon flavoring doesn't taste real at all. The lemon taste is also far too overpowering. Had it actually tasted like lemonade I would have been okay with that, but the way things are it was too much. I drank my one glass, and when I went up for a refill I noticed that someone else had brought Arizona's Arnold Palmer and I ended up drinking that the rest of the night.

Craig loved raspberries. He lived in the country where there were fields that he spent many a summer day foraging for raspberries. He knew how to spot good ones and which ones to leave for another day. He brought some home sometimes to make raspberry juice which was just him crushing raspberries in a mortar and pestle and then pouring the juice through a strainer. It's poor man's juice, sure, but it was also delicious. His mom came home from the market with a pomegranate one day and gave it to him. He had no idea what it was but his mom told him to open it and take the seeds out.

He opened the fruit and his eyes lit up. He had never seen so many seeds in all his life. He crushed them up, poured that juice through a strainer and drank it. It was fruity but it was bitter. He tried to mix it with his raspberry juice but he couldn't get a good mix. It was too sweet and too bitter. He tried mixing it with water but, as he expected, it just lessened the flavor. He needed something else. His grandma would make a wonderful, lightly sweetened black tea whenever he came over so he went over there and got a big gallon of it to bring home. He mixed all of the juices together and had it: a lightly sweetened tea with real raspberry juice in it. A little bitter, yet a little sweet with a strong fruit juice flavor that he would drink as much as he could.

His mom couldn't always get pomegranates, but when she could, she did because she actually really liked Craig's concoction. The whole family did and that made Craig very happy.

Johnny was a small-town boy. He grew up in a town with one stoplight, one gas station, one barber, and a local grocery store. He was listening to the radio and heard a sweepstakes where he could win a trip to "the big city." He was the tenth caller, won the prize, and before you knew it, he was on his way. He had been on a train before, but only a few towns over, never this far. It was a two-day trek and Johnny was more than prepared. When he arrived at the hotel in the city, he brought his one bag up and headed back down to enjoy the city itself.

He was a bit thirsty and went next door to a small store to get a drink. There was an endcap, which advertised a low calories, iced tea mix that you could mix with a bottle of water. He remembered that the hotel had a six-pack of water ready for him so he bypassed some of the stranger drinks.

Johnny went upstairs to make some tea and ran into a couple cute girls who he invited them up to his room. He told the girls to relax while he went into the bathroom to mix up a bottle of tea so that in the case that it made a mess, it wouldn't be too bad to clean up. He heard the girls talking and didn't think anything of it. He sat down on the bath to drink a little of the tea and initially it was a bit strong. He could have mixed it into a larger bottle of water, but all he had was a smaller bottle. It was a little bitter and did have some acai flavor. Acai was not a flavor he was familiar with but he thought it was bitter on bitter but mixed with a lot of sweet kind of evened things out. He drank about half of the bottle before he got up to see what the girls were up to. He went to leave the bathroom but the door was stuck. There was a phone in the bathroom, which he used to call the front desk to tell them that he was trapped in the bathroom. They came up and let him out and asked him what he was doing. He told them that he let some nice girls come in the room while he made some tea and then the door wouldn't open. The man asked him what happened to the television and Johnny didn't know what he was talking about. When he walked out of the bathroom, he noticed that the television, radio, coffee maker, and desk lamp was missing. The girls had robbed him. The maintenance man said that there is a security camera that was in front of the elevators and they won't be able to make it out of the hotel without being caught.

Johnny had been in the city for less than an hour and had already gotten robbed. He will never wonder again why his parents and grandparents never went to the city. City girls were trouble and he spent the rest of his trip not talking to anyone.

I do believe that mixing ingredients this way in the olden days would get a person branded a witch. In fact I'm not positive that the folks back at Sun-Rype haven't been dabbling with the black arts. All three ingredients (apple juice, green tea and chai) are all fairly normal on their own. A combination of green tea and chai is a little unorthodox, but it's nothing that someone would really think twice about. Apple and green tea is definitely on the stranger side of things. I don't believe I have ever had an apple flavored green tea. If I did I'm sure the company got it all wrong and instead of using normal apple juice they probably used green apple flavoring, which is the devil in it's own right. All of the above mixtures are acceptable, and I don't think I would think much of them if I saw them, but when you throw all three ingredients into one drink you're going to get my attention (and presumably the attention of some dark beings).

Things have changed as time has gone on. While this mixture probably would have gotten a person drowned or burned at the stake a couple hundred years ago, nowadays it's gets me to yell, “Holy Crap!” and makes me giddy. I am a staunch supporter of all of these beverages and together they do not disappoint. The apple juice and green tea blend together fairly seamlessly. It's a wonder that more companies don't use this combination. The chai is the game changer though. It makes this drink taste like nothing I have ever had before. It adds a slight vanilla spice flavor of the likes that juice has never seen before. It forms a new hybrid creature that would be unstoppable if only the dark lord would make it a sentient being. Luckily for the world it remains just a delicious juice-tea combo that will knock your socks off.

I can only imagine how sticky the bed of that truck has to be. Driving bottles of iced tea and lemonade all over every day, every week, every month of the year bottles have to break. You also can tell that they do most of their driving on old dirt roads with dust blowing up everywhere. I bet the bed of that there truck is a dirty sticky mess. You know who is winning out with this ice tea leakage? The ants and bees, that's who. The ants are crawling their way up the tires, while the bees just buzz over to feed on the sweetness that is left behind once the glass is cleared away. Those lucky bugs are filling up their stomachs with some of the tastiest summer beverages available in the northeast. When one of these bottles of raspberry tea lemonade busts open it must be like a holiday to them. To start off the raspberry tea is great. Each swig tastes like you sitting on the back of that truck downing a bushel of ripe raspberries while gulping down a big jug of sweetened iced tea to fight the heat. If that tea wasn't enough for you, you are in luck because they cut it right in half with some quality lemonade. It was one a bit on the bitter side, but the sweetness of the tea took care of that and the two flavors now live in perfect harmony, well that is until the ants and bees come along and eat/drink it all up.

These are dangerous times guys, dangerous times. They are dangerous times to be a small company because large companies are getting smarter and making some awesome products. Snapple, in my eyes, was long forgotten for a long time and then in the last couple years they ramped it up and now make delicious tea. That's why it drives me crazy when I see small companies using garbage ingredients. You know that Snapple could make way more if it used worse ingredients but there is someone digging their feet in ensuring that doesn't happen.

This tea is pretty great. I've been doing this for long enough to know different varieties of tea and flavoring. This is a lightly sweetened (both as advertised and as practiced) white tea. It's good. I would like it if this was just that: simple, efficient, and beautiful. I've never had just a plain sweet white tea. It would be fantastic. You hear me, Snapple? I'll buy it. Cherry is a rarity in tea but pomegranate is a bit old hat. The pomegranate in this is good, but it might be about 33% of the fruit. Cherry takes the majority, a majority I'm calling 66%, and is right on the cusp. It's a dangerous line that it walks because sometimes people think that cherry tastes mediciny but this is not at that rate. It's good. White tea plus cherry plus pomegranate is a good mix. Let it be known.

Snapple, you've done good work. You made something new and I've got to give you credit because it was a fantastic implementation.