Tea Information:

Leaf Type:  Black

Where to Buy: Tetley Tea or where Tetley Products are sold.

Tea Description:

Round, stringless tea bags are made with our unique Perflo tissue—sturdy, yet soft and porous, for faster tea infusion and better flavor release. 2 tea bags make 2 quarts of iced tea.

Learn more about this tea here.

Taster’s Review:

I don’t usually buy bagged teas off the supermarket shelf – and by this I mean to say, I just don’t do it.  I guess I’m a bit of a tea snob.  But when Tetley sent me a box of their Iced Tea Blend to try, I was willing to do so because a) that’s what I do, and b) tea.  Tea makes me happy.

And really, when it comes to iced tea – especially cold-brewed iced tea – I really do prefer a bagged tea to a loose leaf tea.  When drinking hot tea, I’m all about the loose leaf but when it comes to cold-brewing tea for iced tea, I prefer the convenience of a bagged tea because less mess = happier me.

So, I was actually happy to have this tea sent to me to try.  I’m getting a little low on my cold-brew tea options (time to shop) and this helped to postpone my shopping for a little while, anyway!

To brew it, I filled my half-gallon glass iced tea pitcher full of freshly filtered water and then I dropped in two of the large tea bags from Tetley into the pitcher.  Then I put the lid on the pitcher and stashed it in the fridge overnight.

Note:  This is essentially “sun brewing” the tea too, because the sun doesn’t actually heat the water sufficiently to ‘brew’ the tea when you put out a jar of sun tea.  By cold-brewing the tea using my above described method, you’re doing the same thing that you’d be doing to make sun tea except that my cold-brewed tea is now chilled.  Eliminated a step!  Yay!

The flavor:  it tastes like black iced tea.  This is an enjoyable unflavored black tea blend.  I think I would prefer this to most other readily available grocery store blends.  It’s refreshing and thirst quenching and the flavor is there.

This tastes like a pleasant iced tea.  It doesn’t taste “dusty” the way some of those supermarket teas can taste.  It’s smooth – not astringent and not bitter.  It is brisk without an overly aggressive flavor.  It’s a medium to full flavored tea, I suspect it’s a Ceylon or since it’s a blend, it’s comprised of mainly Ceylon leaves.  It has that very clean, moderate, no-nonsense type of flavor that Ceylon tea is known to deliver.

If I were in need of an iced tea fix and I wanted a good, unflavored iced tea, I could see myself grabbing a box of this tea off the shelf.  And since it is an unflavored tea, it allows for many interesting possibilities:  try adding a few thin slices of lemon to the iced tea pitcher when you’re brewing it, or perhaps some crushed mint leaves or a couple of cinnamon sticks!