National Iced Tea Day is June 10 this year. What is your favorite ICED TEA concoction and how do you prepare it?
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I really like Orange Pekoe or English Breakfast made as suntea, and a lemon-ginger suntea brew with a fresh mint muddle. Tall glass, over ice, no sweetener. Lemon slice, optional.
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I like English Breakfast tea or I’ll make a jug of iced Lipton tea for iced tea. No sugar, no anything else.
A big favorite of mine is imported from Japan and canned- UCC Oolong. On ice, nothing else added.
Any kind of sweet tea makes me want to barf.
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I like iced tea but I never make iced tea at home, and I’m not sure why. I drink hot tea all the time. Maybe it’s because when I want iced tea, it’s too late to make one to satisfy my craving. I make lemonade, and even Chinese herbal drinks through out the year. I should add iced tea to the mix.
For the not-homemade brew, I like peach iced tea and the occasional raspberry iced tea, around with the classic iced tea with lemon. Definitely needs a bit of sugar for me, but not heavy handed.
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Lipton
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I make and drink gallons of iced tea all the time. My favorite is Luzianne (unsweetened and unflavored) but since I started to drink so much of it, I changed to Luzianne Decaf. I find that with the Decaf I need to add flavor, and I use dried peppermint that I get from Penzey’s.
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Unsweetened. Unflavored. Maybe a lemon slice.
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I haven’t made iced tea in so long.
I buy a lot of bottled peach iced tea and lemon iced tea.
I will try this once local peaches are available
The infused syrup solution sounds good. Almost like starting a shrub, but water vs the vinegar, and no fermentation time period. I’ve made a few blueberry shrubs over the last few years; I wonder how that would taste with iced tea.
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I had a classmate/neighbor who would always stir a big spoon of frozen orange juice concentrate into her big glass of iced tea. Actually it was pretty tasty.
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That sounds very good and reminisicent of an “Arnold Palmer”, the combination of lemonade and iced tea. When I found self-service drink machines which offered good or at least palatable versions of both (i.e. not instant), I would often combine them. However, here in Japan, while self-service drink machines are quite common, lemonade is relatively rare and iced tea is generally Earl Grey, which I find doesn’t combine as well with lemonade as Orange Pekoe does.
Veering off topic, the clear, bubbly Japanese drink sold in glass bottles like this is known as “ramune”.
The flavor is kind of frutti-tutti but is supposedly like 7Up or Sprite. The name is based on what the Japanese misheard as “lemonade”. Apparently, what North Americans call “lemon-lime” soda is called “lemonade” is some (but not all) British Commonwealth nations, notably Australia. Both the mishearing of the word and the difference between North American lemon-lime soda and lemonade were quite a surprise to me when I found out.
And do you see that glass marble in the neck of the bottle? That is used instead of a normal bottle top. The bottles are covered in a plastic wrapper, a (blue in the illustration) plastic cover and a piece (pink in the illustration) to push the marble down to open the bottle like this.
Sadly, the glass bottles are gradually being replaced with plastic ones. I can’t drink sugar-sweetened drinks anymore, but if I could I likely wouldn’t buy the ones sold in plastic bottles because half the fun of drinking “ramune” is having it in glass bottles. BTW, the angle to drink “ramune” without having the glass marble get in the way can be quite difficult to achieve.
Lastly, to complicate things more and get even further off-topic, what are known as “Sweetarts” or “Smarties” in the US and “Rockets” in Canada are sold in Japan as “ramune”. And “Smarties” in Canada are similar to “M&Ms” in the US (but are round, not oval.) The names of products can be interesting and very confusing as well!
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I’m remembering very vaguely years and years ago the manager of a family market brought in some bottled Japanese beverages with marbles in the top/bottleneck. They were on display on a little table. I don’t think they were a hit; haven’t seen them in years. That manager works at another location of the store; if I ever see him again (the pandemic brought a long halt to my in store shopping; I go now) and remember to ask about the drinks, I will.
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In general, people here in Japan buy “ramune” because of the novelty & nostalgia factor, not because of the taste. While there’s no deposit required for the bottles, they are hard to dispose of, heavy and don’t have much of a capacity. In addition, the glass ones tend to be on the expensive side considering the amount of soda that’s in them. I imagine because of their weight and limited appeal, the cost overseas might be prohibitively high.
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My niece for a while was delighted with ramune and would buy one when we hit the Asian markets - this was her pre-teen and early teen years. I tried one, and O.M.G. I’ve always heard of them but I don’t really drink soda, so this drink didn’t appeal to me. The amount of sugar in the drink literally made my teeth hurt. I had to pour the rest out after one sip. But to their credit from a marketing perspective, they come in a wide variety of flavors. They had a blueberry one which suckered me in; and maybe the blueberry one was exceptionally sweet.
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That’s interesting as here in Japan I don’t recall seeing flavored ramune here. (TBH, they probably exist, but I don’t really spend time looking at sugared drinks.)
“Ramune” is considered a flavor itself so if you changed the flavor, I guess most people wouldn’t consider it as being ramune anymore.
Carbonated soft drinks in Japan go by many names, “Cider” is one of them with “Mitsuya Cider” being a very old brand. It tends to be even sweeter than ramune and tastes like bubble gum to me. People here often refer to carbonated soft drinks as “juice” as well. That’s really strange to me as they nearly never contain any fruit juice.
A colleague who was on the keto craze started putting spoonful’s of coconut oil in her iced tea.
Hard pass.
Nope!
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Decaf that jar and I’m with ya!
I USED to love both Thai iced tea and Thai iced coffee, although I only drank it in Thai restaurants. Since I no longer drive, I haven’t had either in years and at this point, no longer like things at that sweetness level.
