Southern Boy Teas

So happy that Frank restocked this. I love iced tea and cold brews, and of course all tea in general. And I love how easy it is to use pre-bagged iced tea blends!

I brewed for 3 minutes in 2 cups water, then added cold water, as per the directions on the package. But I think next time I will brew for a bit longer.

This dry tea smells almost like those sour raspberry hard candies – the ones that are shaped like raspberries. Mmmmm! The brewed iced tea flavour still tastes like raspberry candy, with a slight hint of tartness (pleasant tartness, not too sour tartness). But you can also taste the black tea. I love it when iced tea tastes like this. You get the black tea flavour, but there is also a fruity/candy flavour overtop of it, and it is not just juice-like. However, I do like the teas that taste like juice, I just reserve those for cold brewing. (I find there is a difference between cold brewing and iced tea, and some teas are better one way than the other). I added a bit of white sugar and it just enhanced the raspberry candy flavour.

Anyway, super happy with this iced tea. I even went and ordered more before it goes out of stock, and ordered some of the other flavours as well!

I kept the tea bag and am going to try a re-steep and see what happens.

Edit: This made an excellent resteep. I steeped for 5 minutes. Tastes exactly like the first steep. I already got rid of the tea bag before I tried the second steep, but I wish I didn’t because I think it may have made a third steep…

Prepared this one basically to the instructions on the bag.
It smelt like sherbet, but it also smelt highly of.black tea…. Erg
It definitely did taste like delicious rainbow sherbet, but tasted way to strongly of black tea for my liking. With several teaspoons of rock sugar I was able to kill the black tea taste enough to thoroughly enjoy the creamy rainbow sherbet goodness.

A crazed Lime Jello Salad green fan, I’ve been curious to see how this one compares. That day has finally come.

I had a hunch it wouldn’t be as good seeing that there is no marshmallow in this. But the base is a success. It works very well with the lime. Gives it a little more edge. But I still prefer the green tea + marshmallow combination. It’s dreamy times.

Not my favourite SBT (it’s Rainbow Sherbet for me) but I’d say this comes in second.

I made this yesterday afternoon as a treat for my kids (and myself). They each inhaled a glass when they got home from school and then continued drinking it through dinner. It is definitely a big hit around here.

I was able to sneak a glass for myself, and the sweet spun sugar taste is really delicious. It immediately made me think of picnics, birthday parties and waking on the boardwalk in Ocean City. Happy thoughts with a happy tea!

So my kids have decided that we need Cotton Candy, Bubblegum, and Watermelon SBT on hand always. I have a few other teas to add to that list, so it looks like we’ll be planning an order with Frank sooner rather than later.

Today was unseasonably warm. I took my son to the park, and I was wearing a short sleeved shirt and no jacket. In December! Anyway, when we got home I wanted something cold to drink. I had made this earlier in the day, (iced tea has become my replacement for Diet Coke) so I poured myself a glass and YUM. The cotton candy flavor is great. I did sweeten the tea with a touch of sugar to bring the flavor out more. Both of my kids tried it, and they loved it. This is a tea I would love to serve at a summer cookout. For now though I will be happy drinking a glass while I watch the lights on my Christmas tree twinkle.

I was given an Adagio Teas Ingenuitea iced tea maker a while ago and both me and my husband are off work today and felt like brewing up a batch of iced tea. A few months ago I placed an order with 52 tea’s and was excited to try this tea as I had never had banana flavoured tea before (and still haven’t). With my need for iced tea and my husbands love for banana’s it was easy to decide to brew this tea and use my Adagio Teas Ingenuitea gadget for the first time.

As I opened the little packet to expose the large prepared teabag I took in a strong smell of banana’s, it smelt almost milkshake like. The last time I had beer flavoured anything it was for my husbands birthday (5th November) last month when I bought some banana beer as a novelty. Funnily enough I can member saying that smelled like banana milkshake too, which means it also smells like the loose tea for this.

Brewed and left to chill for a few hours while my ice in the freezer becomes solid, it’s been difficult to leave the mixture in the fridge without sneaking a taste. I remain a good girl though and have left it well alone..until now. Serving time. :D

The iced tea is brown in colour, monkey coloured some may say, and it still maintains the amazing banana smell. It’s a sweet yet creamy banana smell, very candy like.

The flavour is more subtle, while I can taste banana I can also taste a rather malty yet cocoa nibbish. The balance is about right for me, it’s not too sweet nor too earthy and the banana lingers in the after taste quite nicely. Such a nice novelty :)

I would buy this again as it’s perfect for the occasional hot spells we get here in the UK (if we’re lucky) but at the same time I’m quite happy with a few others I have in for loose tea at the moment. Great job 52 Teas, yummy work. :)

I’ve been making iced tea for our housemate lately, and Monkey Fart is currently in the pitcher. Tonight I had some with dinner (beef brisket and a big salad) and I have to say, yum! This tastes like a banana, and reminds me a little bit of hard candy. Pretty tasty, and this is housemate approved (but I didn’t tell him it was called Monkey Fart, it’s a secret).

Thanks 52teas for sending a lovely sample of this! So yeah, it was kind of chilly for an iced tea… But Rainbow Sherbet? I’d drink it in a blizzard, it’s that good. The flavors are so tangy. I’m getting more lime than anything. But I’m not complaining :] This is the best iced tea I’ve had in a loooong time. I will definitely be ordering more!!

Last SBT I have to try. As usual, I cold steeped this, and this tea is oh so thirst-quenching. Heavier on the tea base, but the base is exquisite. Ultra smooth, a lots of depth. The raspberry, on the other hand, is on the weaker side, but I’m actually happy because it is a little on the artificial. It lends a nice touch of sweetness to the tea, and while it’s not in-your-face raspberry, you get the picture when you drink it. It’s sweetened raspberries if you think about it.

It’s quite good. Not my favourite SBT, but better than, say, Neapolitan Ice Cream, in my opinion.

I actually sipped this one down a couple months ago. By far my favourite SBT. Like actual melted rainbow ice cream in a jug. This was also the last 52teas blend I owned, and it’s going to stay that way.

Oh, how I love this stuff. Truly like rainbow sherbet minus the calories. In fact, I like it even better because sometimes I just feel like experiencing the flavour of rainbow sherbet/ice cream but don’t want the actual sugar and milk and what not. So this is perfect.

Mmm, rainbow sherbet. I have a few bags so I thought it was time to treat myself to one of them. I’ve yet to try it with milk to see what it would do to the flavour.

Now this make some pretty droolworthy iced tea. I cold brewed it, which is what I usually do, and it’s bang-on on the rainbow sherbet smell and taste. I get more lime than anything else. I like this one a lot more than the Neapolitan Ice Cream because you get more of the flavours, since I found the Neapolitan to be a little too plain strong black tea in flavour.

Also, I didn’t bother adding anything to it because I like it the way it is. The rainbow sherbet makes it sweet enough. This hefty tea bag has brewed up one of the greatest iced teas ever. Merçi beaucoup, Frank!

After reading other tasting notes I decided to cold brew this tea. Really couldn’t be easier. I filled up my pitcher to the 2 quart mark, put in the teabag and left it in the refrigerator overnight. I removed the bag after about 12 hours. I will try a resteep.

With the first taste I thought it wasn’t quite as good as hot steeping then icing the whole leaf version from last year. But today (it’s been in the refrigerator an additional day after removing the teabag) it’s perfect. Just delicious. So limey and creamy. No bitterness or astringency. Good tea flavor underneath. This is fantastic. It will definitely go on my reorder list.

Cold brewed yesterday afternoon, had some this morning.

Just got off the phone with potential employer, some kind of pre-interview screening/chat thing. So nerve-racking! I hate that moment when you hang up and want to hit yourself in the head for all the things you messed up/should’ve said. Anyway, hopefully it’ll turn out well. Relocating soon and I need a job!

Oh yeah, the tea! This really does taste like sherbet! I added a little stevia to bring out the fruit flavors a bit more. That said, while I do like this and it tastes really great. I have some strange conflicted feelings about sherbet flavored tea, like it shouldn’t be possible. Who knows, maybe my brain is just addled from the call!

Okay, so I had NO idea how to prepare this one. And the instructions I found, uh, a bit on the baffling side:

Steep one teabag in 16oz boiling water for 3 minutes, strain tea into 2-qt pitcher, fill with cool water, serve over ice.

Okay, from reading Frank’s comments about these bags making “two quarts” of iced tea, I figured the “2-qt” thing was two quarts, but that still leaves me with the following questions:

-If it makes two quarts, why not make that amount hot and then chill it? Why prepare 16oz first and then water it down? Is this basically instructions to make a concentrate with the idea that the added cool water will make it instantly ready-to-serve?
-If it’s in a teabag in the first place, why would I need to “strain” it?
-Dear goofy Americans and your goofy measurements, WHAT ON THIS GREEN-BUT-OZONE-DEPRIVED EARTH IS A QUART?!?

I had to consult several cookbooks (the internet machine was being used by my sister, unfortunately) to determine that this “quart” thingie is apparently a [baffling!] measurement of 1.89271 litres. (Okay, I actually figured out that it’s a bit under two litres, and the internet machine gave me the exact number just now. Shush.)

Which, I’m sorry to say, reminded me quite a bit of this: http://i49.tinypic.com/14v63rn.jpg

I’m sorry America, but why. WHY AMERICA.

Anyway. Unfortunately, I do not even own a “2 quart” pitcher. I have a 1.6L pitcher (that’s 1.6907 quarts, for those of you following along at home), and that’s the biggest pitcher that will still fit in my fridge. Okay, I figured, that’s okay – the tea will end up a bit concentrated, but it’s RAINBOW SHERBET flavoured, so how could that be a bad thing?!

In the end, I decided to follow the instructions as exactly as possible, Just. In. Case. I put some rock sugar at the bottom of my pitcher, filled my 16oz Tea Master up with just-boiled water to get the measurement right, dispensed it into my pitcher and dropped the tea bag in.

Then I was left with the problem of how to fish the bag OUT again. Since it doesn’t have a string attached to it. Or, I guess, a rope, really, since it’s a big tea bag. I guess maybe that’s why the directions say to strain it?

Well, no worries! I figured, I’ll just use kitchen tongs! …But then I discovered (as my timer ticked down) that I can’t get the handle of the tongs past the opening. Whoops. I finally ended up just rolling up my sleeve, reaching delicately into the pitcher and fishing the bag out by one corner. Good thing I have pathetic skinny chicken arms; if I had hammy man-arms, my poor tea would have been screwed. Although I guess I could have tried pouring it back into the Tea Master.

I didn’t add cold water right away, since those darn rock crystals, awesome-tasting though they are, really don’t like to dissolve well. I added some more hot water and stirred until they did…then I added cold to fill, and stuck the whole thing in the fridge to chill for several hours. Whew! A more involved process for a pitcher of iced tea than I’ve bothered with before, but I guess I’ve got the details hammered out now.

So, the tea:

Dry smell is AMAZING. It made my entire kitchen smell exactly like rainbow sherbet from the moment I opened the bag! The wet smell is pretty much precisely the same, so I excitedly let my mother sniff the already-steeped bag, and she said it smelled like department-store perfume. (Sigh. I need to stop letting my mother smell my tea, because she always smells something strange in the leaves. No matter how bang-on the scent actually is, she always comes out with something like, “perfume,” or “paint chips.” Seriously, Mum?!)

Ultimately, it’s not quite as sherbet-y tasting as I was expecting. I was a bit surprised by this (given the strength of the tea’s scent), but there is definitely a smooth black tea coming through first, with sherbet more towards the back of the sip. But it’s definitely there, orange and lime and raspberry and something else that makes it specifically sherbet-like (and not like ice cream). The more I drink it, the more I feel like it grows on me, and indeed, the more I can actually taste the sherbet, too! This, like DAVIDsTEA’s Tropicalia and Root Beer Float is one that I decided to add milk to, because the cream (or something like it) implied by the flavour is so enhanced with a bit of milk. It didn’t exactly knock me over, but it’s still delicious, and I am going to go cold-steep the bag now for another pitcher to see what I can get out of it.

Oh my. This one exceeded my expectations. I had the neopolitan ice cream SBT and enjoyed that but this one is even better. I mostly get lime and orange and there’s a definite creaminess to it, this is incredibly refreshing. I’ll definitely be buying more of this. As a side note, I’m finding that I’m getting better results with these SBT teas when I take the leaves out of the bag and cold brew like normal.

Right now, for my next experiment, I’ve got a jug of Blueberry Zabaglione cold-brewing in the fridge and I’m sure that’s gonna be great as well.

Edit: I just noticed it’s spelled “sherbet”. My whole life I thought it was “sherbert”… Haha

Since my huge package of tea from Amanda arrived today, I decided to try a bunch of things from this latest box (to kind of get a head start on it before taking it upstairs…!)

Picked this to try iced today. Brewed up in 2 cups of water and chilled it in the fridge. I’m drinking about a 1:1 mixture of it right now. I don’t think the teabags brew up quite as strong as I would like them to. Anyhow, it’s definitely limey, and I can taste a bit of the black base, but I’m almost getting a strange chloriney flavour with it. It’s a bit disconcerting. Kind of like smelling pool water. So this one’s definitely not my favourite, although for a lime lover who doesn’t smell chlorine, this is probably pretty tasty! Glad I only had Amanda pick up one of these for me though :)

On the Seventh Day of Christmas, SBT sent me this tea!

And it is just as yummy as I remember it. I still prefer the cotton candy white tea to this, just because the lightness of the white tea allows the delicate notes of cotton candy to really shine through, but this one is still amazing. Love!

Here’s my full-length article: http://sororiteasisters.com/2013/12/31/seventh-day-christmas-southern-boy-teas-edition/

I cold-brewed this tea last night and have been drinking it all afternoon. I sort of missed iced tea weather … but, I still prefer the cooler weather when I can comfortably drink hot tea all day!

This is as yummy as I remember it.

I’ve had a couple of glasses of this iced tea today (cold-brewed), and it is very yum. I must admit that I do prefer the original cotton candy, but this Southern Boy version is good too. Interestingly, I notice a chocolate-y tone to this toward the finish. Sweet, cotton candy-ish, and then caramel and chocolate. Quite a treat.

Frank, if you’re reading this … now would be a good time for one of those blow-out type of specials that you occasionally offer. How about like 40% off orders over $80. (see, I’m going to have to resubscribe within the next couple of weeks or so) If you do, I’ll add more of the Southern Boy teas to my subscription. :)

Anyway, this is very refreshing and delicious. Better than any soda!

Arrived home today to 3 boxes of tea. With more stuff on the way. Oy vey. I suppose I could have mentioned earlier that I am (sadly) back at home now. :(

Anyways, one such box was from 52teas, because I splurged and went for the grab bag sale, and picked up some additional SBT tea bags so I could try almost all of the flavours (the rest were purchased a while back and are en route from Amanda! And I say almost all, because I have zero interest in RadioactiviTEA :P)

Figured I’d give this one a shot tonight, seeing as it’s the only one I bought two of, based on the rave reviews.

Brewed one giant teabag up in 2 cups of water in a pyrex measuring cup at approx. boiling for 3 minutes. So my “concentrate” needs to be diluted 1 part tea:3 parts water. I tried a bit tonight (probably the wrong proportion), and I must say that I’m definitely getting more cotton candy flavour (even lukewarm) than I got with the actual tea. It smells like spun sugar. It tastes like spun sugar. Delicious strawberry spun sugar. With a nice black tea background that’s neither bitter nor astringent. Nor too strong. This is truly a treat. I can see myself drinking through this rather quickly. I think the cup I made for myself might have been about a 1:3 mix, so I might stick with that instead of 1:4.

I stuck the teabag in the fridge so I can give it a second round tomorrow, because 2 bags is probably not enough to have purchased…

ETA: Had some more today and inexplicably didn’t like it as much. Must be a mood/tastebud thing. How annoying.

Phew! How can life manage to be so busy and so dull at the same time? :P I’ve been swamped with school work in the final class of my online graduate certificate. It’s proven to be an astounding amount of work. Luckily, my full-time job is dependent upon the certificate, so they do allow me to complete assignments during work hours. Otherwise, I probably wouldn’t be able to do it.

It’s also been so hot, I can’t even imagine drinking hot tea. Well, I can imagine it, but it’s not appealing. Time to try another iced tea from 52teas’ spin-off brand, Southern Boy Teas!!

I love sherbet! Lime sherbet is probably my favorite. My mom always used to buy me some when I got strep throat. I hope this tea will be a healthier alternative! I brewed it up per the instructions on the packet, except I subtracted one cup of water so I could add ice without diluting it.

But just like with ice cream, I’m not sure sherbet translates into tea well. I believe this tea is lime, orange, and raspberry flavored. Honestly, that’s kind of a weird combination in my book. I’m not sure what to make of it.

The more I drink it, the more the flavors blend together to become a true sherbet taste. It’s good, and it’s definitely well made. It’s just not a favorite flavor combo of mine. I think it may take me a few days to finish off this pitcher. If you love these flavors, then you really can’t go wrong with this tea! I just prefer the strawberry, vanilla, chocolate combo in the Neapolitan Ice Cream tea.

I cold-brewed this and drank it all day yesterday and having my very last glass today after mowing the lawn.

This is really good, although I prefer the green tea Lime Jello Salad version from 52Teas better. The green tea seemed to go perfectly with the flavors. But this is very good, very refreshing, and very smooth. Sweet and pleasingly tart. Nice.