Southern Boy Teas

I made this up the other day. It was good, but the Cotton Candy flavor every one raved about this one didn’t really come out that much. I mean it tasted sweet, but I wasn’t getting a cotton candy flavor. Maybe next time I will try to sweeten this with sugar instead of Light agave nectar. Anyone else have any suggestions?

Perfect for summer sweetness!

I made a pitcher of iced tea with this one, added some sugar and Oh my goodness does it hit the mark for cotton candy. Smells and tastes like a pink fluffy cloud of cotton candy to me. The black tea base is good too, not too strong which is nice because cotton candy is a very delicate flavor to me.
Had I never found Steepster I would have never imagined cotton candy tea was out in this world. Woot! I have cotton candy matcha too!

I used to thinking of iced tea as being fruit flavoured so cotton candy struck me as a bit of an odd choice for this style of tea. None the less it seems to work pretty well. The spun sugar cotton candy flavour was a bit on the subtle side but adding a tablespoon or so of agave nectar to the jug helped bring it out.

Yay I’m getting allergy tested in a couple weeks. UGH a couple weeks, I finally realized ragweed is at it already and that’s why I’ve felt terrible for a week. I’ve never been allergy tested so it will be nice to know what exactly does bother me. Allergy season here sucks. I’ve tried honey, I hate taking antihistimines, so we’ll see.

The first of my flavor oils for lip balm have arrived…they smell soooo good and I was reminded of the fact I still have several of these teabags to use while the weather’s still lovely for iced tea. (Just kidding, I’ll drink it all year.)

Opening the bag smelled just like opening up a package of jello. It tastes a lot like it too. I really like the Lime Jello Salad green tea, and I think I still like it more, just because it has a creaminess to it.

This though, seriously it’s like the jello water from when you were sick as a kid, except far less cloying in flavor.

The addition of a couple drops of agave made it taste even more like jello, minus the weird texture! I will have no problem finishing this pitcher and then making another.

I did a little dance when I opened this one up. It smells SO sweet and sugary and a bit caramelized and just so much like cotton candy! And the scent filled up my kitchen. So I knew this was going to be good. I’m the only one in my house who drinks iced tea on a regular basis, so I didn’t want to make a full pitcher. That, and I wanted to be able to make this goodness last as long as possible! So I cheated and tore open the tea bag, poured the leaf into another container, and will be making this by the cup instead.

I also cheated by trying this hot for the first time, instead of iced! After smelling the dry leaf I knew I wouldn’t be able to wait for it to chill or cold brew. So I added a bit of milk, a touch of cream, and some sugar to my cup. Mmmm, it still smells so strongly of cotton candy after steeping! And it tastes divine. Strong black tea base followed by a smooth hit of cotton candy. It’s definitely pink cotton candy rather than blue (blue’s my favourite!) but I can overlook that due to this tea’s impossible yumminess. In comparison to the 52teas version, I find the flavouring to be a bit stronger in this one, and definitely pink cotton candy, whereas I found the other to have more of a generic cotton candy taste. I would happily drink either of them, and while they are definitely different, it would be hard to choose a favourite! Can’t wait to try it iced, as it’s supposed to be.

My brother actually decided he wanted a glass of this! It’s kind of hilarious though because he said it tasted bitter at first, and I know it is not bitter at all. And he wanted a lot of agave in it…jeez.

I gave some to my grandma too and she said it tasted like cherry.

This probably isn’t my favorite, I prefer the regular 52teas Cotton Candy. But it’s still good, I just like the stronger cotton candy flavor. This one has more of a caramelized sugar aftertaste to it than cotton candy to me, and agave doesn’t make it pop like it does to the bubblegum SBT.

That’s not to say I won’t drink this up anyway, it’s still an awesome flavor, especially since I had no idea my brother would ever touch iced tea hahaha.

Last night, hubby and I finished off the gallon of Razzleberry sweet tea in the refrigerator. I was making popcorn and he was headed for the outside fridge and asked if I wanted a drink. (We keep the sodas outside as we buy them in bulk for weekends when the whole herd of teenagers descends upon us.)

I told him thank you, but no, as I was trying to drink tea to limit my soda intake. He hit the brakes and turned to the fridge and fixed a glass for each of us.

Now, help me out if I am wrong, but it seems to me this is a much healthier choice even when sweetened. I am adding one cup of sugar per gallon of iced tea. That makes eight 16 ounce servings, so each serving would have 1/8 cup sugar, which should be approximately 4 teaspoons. Is that correct?

As I did my research, I saw that some of the bottled iced teas in stores have as much sugar as soda! Oh my cow! I have to give Harney Tea some accolades here for having delicious, refreshing iced tea in bottles and keeping it very low in sugar.

So I realize that no sugar would probably be best – and personally there are a lot of teas I could drink unsweetened and iced but the family won’t go for that – but this is a lot better than the ten tsps. of sugar in twelve ounces of cola and I get to avoid burping the bubbles and leaching the calcium from my bones. WIN!

I made this iced tea according to package instructions and I resteeped immediately to get a full gallon. There is no lack of flavor. I LOVE THIS TEA!

I put it all in the small Pottery Barn dispenser, which I then put on the top shelf in my fridge. This was the sweet tea served tonight for Writers’ Group. I mention the dispenser to say that I have found it to be very handy when you have a lot of tea. You don’t have to lift a heavy pitcher, just turn the handle on the spigot and fill your glass. The glass helps the tea get extra cold, too, and since the spigot is metal instead of plastic, you are less likely to have a major catastrophe with a failed spigot.

I added one cup of sugar to one gallon of tea because most of this crowd likes their tea SWEET! Some even add extra simple syrup! This was very well liked tonight.

I have a bunch of new SBT to try, and I can hardly wait!

I had this as a tea slushy in my Zoku tonight as my dessert. YEAH! BABY! Razzleberry, I love you. You are the best flavored iced tea I have ever had.

Wow, I can’t believe I didn’t have this listed in my cupboard! I bought all I could last summer because we loved it, and I am happy to see it is in stock right now. Hooray!

This is good the first day, and knee quivering delicious the second. I make two steeps so I get a gallon out of each pack. Delicious and totally worth it. It is cheaper than soda and better for me, so I don’t mind that it costs a little more. Hubby and a guest today really enjoyed it.

I am saving the last of my lightly sweetened pitcher for a friend who might come over tomorrow, so with supper tonight I am having the very sweet one. Though I call it very sweet, it has half the sugar my mother used to put in her iced tea. Hubby agreed to take a sip, and he doesn’t drink much iced tea anymore because he loves sugar, but this one got him. He didn’t give it back to me at first, sipped a bit more, then said, “Wow, this is soooo smooth.”

And even though I have largely given up sugar in my tea, this is so good it is making me weak in the knees. I don’t know why, but the teas reach a state of absolute perfection in the fridge a couple of days after you hot brew them. Definitely ordering more, and trying more of the flavors.

Edited to add: Just offered hubby some more of the tea. He points out the most gigantic drinking glass we own, now empty, but apparently moments ago filled with this tea. I guess I better order some more quickly!

I made two steeps of this, and I sweetened one quite a bit for other folks, and for myself I added only a tiny bit of raw sugar.

The sweet one was put to the test last night when a guest who doesn’t like any tea except grocery store super sweet black iced tea had supper here. I offered a sip of this, she said it was fantastic, and drank a whole glass with her meal.

I opted to drink the barely sweetened one, and it was delicious.

I am making these according to package directions, not cold steeping them. I have found – and maybe it is some weird psychological thing – that they taste best after the tea has been in the fridge for at least one day. Somehow the flavors seem the most natural and refreshing for me that way.

Good stuff, and I hope to be sharing it with another friend later so I can get her reaction on it as well.

I just received my order from 52teas today, and I was so excited to try this one! I made it according to the package instructions. To the first 2 quart pitcher I added three tablespoons of sugar. To the resteep pitcher, which I made right away, I added (gulp) one cup of sugar cuz that’s how hubby rolls! LOL! So that pitcher is for him and for the kids!

The tea is beautifully clear, a nice amber/orange/red color. It looks so refreshing in the glass pitcher. It smells fruity and good, and the tea is not covered up by the flavoring.

When I started leaving sugar out of my hot tea, I never dreamed I could leave it out or cut way back on it in my iced tea. Growing up on super sweet tea (Mom added THREE cups of sugar per gallon of iced tea!), how can you get used to less sugar?

This tea is so good with so little sugar, I don’t even miss the extra sugar. It would probably be fine and dandy with no sugar at all. It is hard to express how grateful I am to have something that tastes this good, is good for me, and has little sugar and almost no calories, yet is natural.

I think there is more SBT in my future. Don’t run out yet, Frank!

Okay when I got to the page for this…Razzle Dazzle from Chicago got stuck in my head.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YW3MIixEps4

Raspberries and blackberries are my favorite berries so I love this tea. It tastes like ripe, crushed berries were poured through my tea before I drank it…if only I had the berries. Nothing artificial about the flavors, just the taste of summer berries.

I got some awesome blackberries a couple weeks ago but I was donating them to some bears so I only got to eat one. I love saying that because it sounds absolutely ridiculous and actually I have no idea what animals got to eat them..but I hope it was the bears. If I had some of them to go with this tea, I would be in fruit heaven right now.

I added a bit of agave to the first cup just to see if it made any difference, but I liked it more just the way it was. It tastes more like candy if it’s sweetened though, which may be a positive depending on your tastes.

I love love love the black tea base in these bags so much. Even though this is only the third one I’ve tried so far (I have all the rest of the flavored ones so far, I just ordered radioactiviTEA though), it really is perfect. It goes with every flavor beautifully in a delicious balance.

Last tasting note until Sunday or Monday, I’m so excited to go to Florida even if it’s for not even 48 hours, ahhh! Of course, a couple orders arrive tomorrow. I hope they get put in a locker and not taken to the front office so I can’t have them till Monday, that would be sad.

This note is for the second steep of the teabag. If you want to resteep one of these, but don’t want a gallon of tea in your fridge at once because you can’t drink it all up in a couple days, it works really well to freeze the concentrated 2 cups for a couple days until you’re ready to drink more! If I had space for extra ice cube trays that would be perfect. You could just throw them in some water and be set to go pretty quickly.

But in my case I created a giant ice cube, let it melt a bit so I could just pop it into the pitcher, filled it up with water, and let it melt down to mostly all liquid for already cold tea! I’ve got one bottle to take with me on the road tomorrow and I’ve nearly had the rest to drink already today, wow.

I sweetened it before I froze it, but I think this steep actually tastes better than the first anyway. The banana is more subtle and sweetening doesn’t bring it to the point of candy. I think it makes it taste even more like real banana this time around. I will definitely get this one again!

Well, I got my haircut. Except instead of layers, I got Megan Draper a la Mad Men. Bah. Nice lady and all but seriously I said I wanted layers. I guess she was too busy yelling at me for bleaching part of my hair that was basically all cut off.

Thankfully I don’t mind it and my day was made better by more SBT bags coming in the mail, yay! I was feeling like banana so I decided to have this one.

It’s somewhat subtle, which I like because banana is a pretty difficult flavor. Too much tastes like candy and it seems like it’d be really hard to get a natural tasting flavor. Of course, if banana candy is what you’re after, give it a good bit of sweetener, and you’ve got it. I thought it was pretty good with nothing added because the banana just tasted so good with the black tea. But with a good bit of agave, it’s even more banana tasting with a candy aftertaste.

Love it! Definitely going to give this bag another steep. I should have about 2 quarts of bottles to take with to Florida this weekend then and I can just put this all in them hahaha. I just steeped it up and once it cools I’ll pop the 2 cups in the freezer until Thursday. This had me worried though, when I go up to North Carolina for 5 days WHAT AM I GOING TO DO??? The water there is horrid, I think there’s a hot water dispenser in the lobby but I am still terrified to use it with legitimate tea instead of the cheap tea bags I recall them having. I guess it might be cold steeping in the cooler with water bottles up there!

I should also add this is even better after its spent the night in the fridge. Even more banana flavor without the need of any sort of addition! Now I imagine if you REALLY wanted banana runts, you could add sweetener and it’d taste like them. Awesome!

Just made a pitcher of this at home. It’s another blistering day in Wichita. This is unmistakably banana. I’m thinking the black tea base maybe takes some of that Laffy-Taffy/Runts flavor away and makes it a bit less artificial tasting. To me, it’s just the right hint of sweetness in an awesome black tea without actually BEING sweetened. My wife prefers her iced tea with Splenda and insists this is amazing that way (too sweet for me, but to each their own).

I reallly love the ease of these teabags. I’m getting some samples of different pillow pack bags in to consider for the next round. As cute as these little bags are, they were a bear to get the teabags into.

Thinking about the teabags makes me a little sad. I would love to be able to share our teas with LOTS of people on a much larger scale. The truth is, it is VERY difficult to compete with the big teabag companies. The level of automation they employ and the economies of scale they enjoy are just unbelieveable. At one point I calcluated that to keep my labor costs in line, I needed to be able to produce 80 teabags an hour, weighed, filled and sealed—which was challenging. But if I had $40k, I could buy a weigh-fill-seal machine, fill a hopper with tea and hang up a roll of teabag filter paper and it would make 160 teabags a MINUTE for me. That’s twice my hourly goal in a MINUTE!

Oh well. I spend entirely too much time looking at Youtube videos of industrial equipment. LOL. Maybe someday we could get a bunch of purchase orders from some grocers and take them to the bank and say, “Please, can you help us join the industrial revolution?” Or maybe we’ll crowd source a Form Fill Seal machine though our awesome customers and Kickstarter or one of those sites.

Okay. I’m rambling now. Anyway. The tea is hitting the spot on this very hot day. I hope everyone is having a good Friday and staying cool with some nice iced tea.

Our AC is on the fritz and I think this tea is keeping me sane. It is just an amazing iced tea. A perfect rich tea and then you get that cotton candy finish, and it just makes you happy. Does me anyway. The teabags make it easy too. I just put the teabag in my 2quart pitcher, pour in a bit of boiling water from my tea kettle, and three minutes later, top it off with cool water and pluck the tea bag out for round two later. (Second steep is just as awesome as the first.

Back to my selection of SBTs for today’s cold brew! This is another I first tried last year, and as far as I can recall I really liked it. I’m pleased to report that I like it just as much the second time around. The pink lemonade flavouring is easily detectable — it’s a sort of generically sweet, slightly fizzy tasting, maybe very slightly strawberry/lemon tinged flavour. It’s just like actual pink lemonade! The base is smooth and unobtrusive — it’s the characteristic 52 Teas SBT base, so if you’ve ever tried one before you know exactly what to expect. Brewed at the recommended parameters — 3 minutes in boiling water, topped up with cold to 2 litres and into the fridge overnight — it’s a delicious treat on a warm day. These teas do make work far more bearable!

Another awesome iced tea! I’ve said it before, but I’m really, really impressed with these. This one is no exception. As soon as I opened the packet, I could smell Pink Lemonade, just as I remember it from my childhood. From the first sip, this tastes almost exactly like Pink Lemonade too, only with less sugar and the bonus of being in tea form. I’m glad Frank pointed out that there’s cotton candy flavouring in the mix here, because I could taste that almost immediately and I probably would have been a bit confused! It’s the cotton candy that provides the “pink” here, I think (ooh, rhyme!!), which is them complimented beautifully by a relatively strong, but not bitter or overpowering, lemon taste.

This is another one of those flavours I would have thought it shouldn’t be possible to recreate as tea. Apparently it is, though! This is the perfect choice for the hot, summery day that today has become. It’s sweet, tasty, refreshing, and it’s one of the only cold drinks that keeps my caffiene cravings at bay! I don’t know how I managed before I found these. They’re simply amazing! Great work, Frank!

I made 2L of this before I went camping for the weekend. Smells very much like banana candy or liquor or any banana flavoured thing you can think of, both before and after steeping. Sadly, a lot of the flavour is lost. I know that smell contributes a great amount to our sense of taste but my tongue really didn’t get an awful lot of banana. I gave some to my partner to try without telling her what it is and she could not identify that it was a banana tea. So there.

Brewed as per instructions, bag in 2 cups of boiling water, added cold water to complete a 2 quart (translation: 2 litre) pitcher.

If I could rate on smell alone, Booyah, it is out of the park banana. Flavour disappointing, sorry. I now have the bag cold steeping, we’ll find out tomorrow if it is more flavourful.

6 days later

I resteeped the bag with cold water in the fridge for over 24 hours. Sweetened with agave. It has more flavour this way but still quite subtle. The banana is more in the aftertaste.

This was today’s iced tea for work. It got the usual SBT treatment.

I’ve tried this one before, and I noticed that this time the banana wasn’t as strong BUT it was more natural tasting. Less like banana runts, and more like an actual, slightly under-ripe, banana. Work is totally manic so I didn’t pay much more attention to it than that. Safe to say, I enjoyed it and it’s still one I’d repurchase once I’ve worked through my hoard. Great stuff!

Today’s iced tea of choice. I’m sad that I didn’t get chance to try the honeybush version of this tea, but there you go. If this is anything to go by, it would have been amazing. You can probably already tell this this is a winner with me. It tastes exactly like fresh banana, none of this fakey artificial stuff here. There’s even something a little “green” about it, the taste that banana has when it’s not brown and over-ripe, but just approaching perfection. I think it’s pretty amazing how Frank manages to recreate flavours like this in tea form. No other brand I’ve tried has ever really managed to equal these iced teas.

As ever, the black base here is smooth and unobtrusive. It just supports the flavour perfectly, and adds a little bit of depth to the taste. It’s not too strong, it’s not at all astringent. For me at least, it’s just right. It’s a good thing no-one’s asked me what I’m drinking today. I rave about tea a little bit, if I’m given the chance, but I couldn’t tell the humourless people I work with that I’m drinking Monkey Fart. Such is life. Have to say, though – this is ace tea! I love banana almost unreservedly, from those foam banana sweets to banana milkshake, via all manner of desserts, right along with the real thing. Knowing this, it’s probably not surprising that I like this so much! It’s good, though. Really good. As a bit of a banana maniac, you can take that from me.

Basic math seems to be eluding me – I keep oversweetening this tea since I can’t seem to remember to half the sugar when you half the gallon.

So I made this half gallon too syrupy and I’ll remedy that by boiling up another half gallon and diluting it – the lime, raspberry and orange flavors are fantastic iced and I don’t want to waste any of it now that the weather is perfect for iced tea!