Tea Information:
Leaf Type: Black
Where to Buy: Shanti Tea
Product Description:
A classic summertime drink, our lemon iced tea is a blend of premium black tea, sunflowers, Lemon Peel, and lemon essence. Unsweetened and delicious.
While black tea is in this blend is native to Sri Lanka, America is often credited with the invention of iced tea as we know it today. English and American cookbooks from the 1800s show that tea has been served cold since the early nineteenth century. The oldest recipes in print are made with green tea and not black tea and were called punches. The tea punches went by names such as Regent’s Punch, named after George IV. Iced tea’s popularity parallels the development of refrigeration such as the icebox (refrigerator), and the commercial manufacture of pure ice, which were in place by the middle of the nineteenth century.
Learn more about this tea here.
Taster’s Review:
This is refreshing!
Many of the flavored teas that I’ve tried lately have been on the sweet side. Even the lemon flavored teas have been on the sweeter side, with more of a sweet, creamy, lemon-curd-like kind of lemon taste.
This… is not that tea.
Don’t get me wrong, I have a sweet tooth and I really enjoy the sweeter lemony teas too, but, this is really a refreshing change-up from what I’ve been tasting lately.
This is … quite simply … a bracing black tea and lemon. The black tea is brisk. The lemon is bright and tart. There is some sharpness from the sunflower petals. And that’s it. I did tell you it was simple, didn’t I?
Simple and yet delicious.
The black tea has a crisp astringency to it that compliments the tartness of the lemon. I can feel my mouth slightly pucker at the end of the sip. But I still wouldn’t describe this as sour. Instead, it is pleasingly tart, as though I squeezed a drop or two of lemon in my cup.
I must admit, though, that my first couple of sips of this tea were a bit … jarring. I wasn’t prepared for straight black tea and lemon. After having tried so many sweeter teas lately, I was prepared for a sweeter taste. But after about the third sip, my palate felt renewed! Like it had been inundated with sweetness. In contrast, this is like a palate detox!
A very refreshing surprise.
