Tea Information:

Leaf Type:  Green

Where to Buy:  Southern Boy Teas

Tea Description:

This super refreshing and delicious iced tea will definitely get you in the mood for spring. We’ve blended our sweet organic Chinese sencha fannings green tea with organic cantaloupe, strawberry, blackberry and blueberry flavors. Be warned, this will disappear out of your fridge really fast!

Learn more about this tea here.

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Taster’s Review:

If you’re a frequent reader of our site, then you’ve probably already read a review of this Cantaloupe & Berries Green Tea from Southern Boy Teas!  A few of the sisters are fans of Southern Boy Teas!

I recently acquired a new iced tea jar.  I’ve been looking for either a half gallon or gallon sized glass jar (not a pitcher but a jar) and I’ve finally found one.  This search started several years ago when I was still yearning to make sun tea – before I discovered the joy of cold-brewing tea.

Note:  sun brewing tea is essentially the same thing as cold brewing tea.  The big difference is that with cold-brewing tea, you don’t leave the jar out in the sun, you stash it in the fridge.  This bestows one obvious benefit onto the brewed tea:  it’s COLD when it’s finished brewing.  I don’t think the sun actually ‘brews’ the tea.  The steep in the water brews the tea.  I don’t know that the sun actually does anything to the flavor.  But, I don’t think you could have convinced me of that a few years ago before I actually tried cold-brewing tea.

So I don’t know why it was still important for me to have a jar.  I have an awesome iced tea pitcher that works great for cold-brewing tea.  And to be honest, I prefer my awesome iced tea pitcher over the new tea jar, primarily because this jar has a very annoying lid.  It screws on, the way most jar lids screw on, but the threads don’t line up as easily/nicely as I’d like them to, making it more of a chore to screw on/unscrew the lid than it needs to be.  It’s a minor annoyance, certainly, but, because my awesome tea pitcher doesn’t have this annoyance, it makes it the preferred iced tea vessel.

But one advantage that the new tea jar has over my awesome iced tea pitcher is that the tea jar has a 1 gallon capacity.  Therefore, I could hot-brew a whole GALLON of this tea all at once and didn’t have to stash the tea bag in the fridge to resteep.  I got my full gallon during one brewing session.  (Well, technically, it took four infusions to fill the gallon tea jar.)  Plus, it freed up my iced tea pitcher for another tea so I can have 1 1/2 gallons of iced tea in the fridge for the warm weather ahead.

So, yes, I brewed a gallon of this tea.  I steeped it one quart at a time, bringing the water to 170°F and then allowing the bag to first steep for 1 1/2 minute and adding 30 seconds to each subsequent infusion.

Refreshing!  I like the combination of cantaloupe and berries.  The berries offer the strongest flavor – with strawberry and blackberry dominating, but not by much.  I also get a nice amount of blueberry flavor.  The berries are sweet with that familiar berry tart note.  The cantaloupe offers a sweet, delightful melon note that contrasts nicely with the tart and tangy berries.

The green tea is a little lost in this – but I do get a hint of buttery flavor as well as a hint of that buttery mouthfeel.  I also get just a hint of a fresh, grassy taste.  These notes are subtle and even though I think I’d like the green tea flavors to be a little more distinct, I found this tea very enjoyable overall.