Serious Eats - seriouseats.com

I'll Cop to It: I Love Readymade Diet iced Tea

Posted by Ed Levine, October 11, 2006 at 6:36 AM

I know it makes me a foodie Philistine, but I drink lots of readymade diet iced tea. I know, I know, it doesn't take much to put up your own iced tea, but when you're walking down the street with a powerful thirst and you pass a deli or bodega, a bottle of diet peach Snapple hits the spot. Even when I'm home, it's extremely satisfying to know that when I open the fridge I will find a big plastic container of my current diet iced tea of choice, decaf Turkey Hill iced tea.

I've been buying 64 ounce containers of decaf Turkey Hill decaf iced tea for a few years now. Most of the time it's on special for $1.99, and that represents a lot of thirst quenching for less than two bucks. It doesn't have much tea flavor, but it's cold and sweet with the merest hint of lemon, and it's strangely satisfying. But the last couple of weeks, when I duck into the Fairway at 74th and Broadway, I've found no Turkey Hill iced tea. The only thing they have in the cold case is Diet Nestea in those coated paper containers.

So I bought one of those containers. What a mistake! Diet Nestea tastes awful, downright vile. It has a funny, unpleasant aftertaste that I associate with diet soft drinks made with saccharin. Sure enough, when I looked on the list of ingredients, the sweetener was among them. Nestea, you're a big company with almost unlimited resources. Can't you make a diet iced tea that doesn't make me gag?

There are a number of readymade iced teas I like that I buy in delis and convenience stores. Among them are:

Snapple Diet Peach Iced Tea: When Snapple first introduced Diet Peach Iced Tea more than a few years ago, it became an immediate sensation. For good reason. Whatever peach flavoring agent Snapple uses gives it a very pleasant peachy flavor. I know Snapple isn't really made from the Best Stuff on Earth, but you have to admit, it's a geat tagline. I did chuckle when I took a gander at those peaches right next to the bottle in the photo. That's probably the closest a whole peach ever gets to a bottle of Snapple. Snapple's Diet Lemon is not half as good, but it's still way better than Nestea.

Honest Tea Honest Tea makes a terrific line of regular and green, unsweetened and lightly sweetened iced teas sold in 16 ounce bottles. Note to Michael Pollan and Alice Waters: Honest Tea also makes an Organic Unsweetened Iced Tea. I love its Morrocan mint flavor. Add two packets of Splenda and you've got yourself a fine, fine beverage.

Tazo Tazo has nice vaguely Zen packaging, but I don't find their teas to be as naturally tasty as Honest Tea's.

Tazo even makes tea lattes. Is that anything we'd want to drink?

Republic of Tea Great packaging, pretty good tea.

South Beach: SoBe makes a diet peach iced tea that tastes like they stole the formula from Snapple. It also makes some diet green teas that aren't half-bad at all. Experts have ascribed great therapeutic properties to Green Tea, everything from appetite suppression via changing your metabolic rate to actual nutritional benefits.

Diet Lipton, which is the most ubiquitous readymade tea out there, is only slightly better than Nestea.

So until Fairway brings back Turkey Hill, I'm going to buy the Snapple Diet Peach in the 64 ounce bottles.

So now I've admitted it. I like bottled diet iced tea. What about you? 'Fess up.

6 Comments

Tags: beverages, iced tea