Hot Tea

(backlogging)

Choked down half a cup, hot at a conference as there were no other options and I needed liquid/caffeine. Blegh! Not so much bad tasting, as flavorless and sad. Note to self – put teabags in new purse so that nextime I can BYOT!

I think my palate is receding, because I brewed up a cup of this today (iced) and it didn’t taste that bad. It almost tasted….good?

There needs to be a smiley face rating that goes :O

This is a delightful tea best served dumped in the Atlantic and forgotten about.

Family get-together…We had tea after lunch. Desi family = Lipton tea. And I realized at the exact moment of my mom asking if I wanted chai, that I left all my tea back on campus. This is going to have to do for now.

As far as this tea, what’s there really to review? Now that I’ve tasted higher-quality tea (bagged and loose), this just tastes extremely watery to me. On my first taste, I thought I detected somewhat sweet. It turns out what I was tasting was powdered, non-dairy creamer. Ehh.

backlogging from sat 1 may -

Cup of hot Lipton with lemon at the Arcade diner in Memphis. The trolley couldn’t get there because the switches were out, so after walking the last few blocks through a deluge, with tornado sirens going off around us, this really hit the spot. Everything has it’s place, and the rest of our breakfast was worth all the peril we braved to get there.

This is what I drank for several years before being exposed to looseleaf tea.

Prepared without milk, it is harsh to the point of being almost undrinkable. If I let it get into the side of my mouth under my tongue, it makes me have a horrible puckering feeling there. Like… sour dirt. If it’s steeped for more than 3 minutes or so, I feel like it’s damaging my esophagus as it’s going down.

Prepared with milk, it’s drinkable but still harsh and not particularly flavorful. But, if it were the only black tea in the world, I’d drink it often (with milk). Still beats out a lot of non-tea drinks.

I decided to try this tea at work (because I won’t pay for it) after seeing the “Modern Marvels” episode about tea. Surely if they think highly enough of lipton to dedicate 75% of an episode to it, it must be good right? Wrong! This tea has a decidedly old taste. In fact if you really think about it, it tastes dusty. It is quite obviously over oxidized, which makes sense. Lipton produces millions of pounds of tea a year. Which means they have to get their tea from about as many places. Goodbye terroir, hello heavy oxidation. If you have a load of tea from several different sources, the only way to make it all taste the same and maintain product continuity is to oxidize the hell out of it. It’s like what would happen if you took an apple, a pear, and a carrot and put them in the oven for the clean cycle. At the end of the cycle, they’d all taste the same. Drinking lipton is so unnecessary. Even in places where it’s the only thing available. With the expansion of tea sales on the internet, (case in point: steepster) no one of discerning taste need resort to this unholy liquor. Of course Lipton does do us a big favor. They keep our favorite teas cogent by keeping their market share down, and their batches small.

Euch, this is nothing more that hot leaf juice!

only thing supporting me while working on a sunday. Warm and caffeinated.

Had at a restaurant yesterday…this is tasting more and more like nothingness…sigh…

BUT…when you’re in a pinch and it’s Hot Tea on a really cold day OR Coke…which I couldn’t stomach…it was Tea…

I was out of town and I drank a lot of this over the weekend. Compared to many other teas it doesn’t hold a candle, but I still prefer it to coffee. Steeping and brewing times I left blank because really…who cares with this one? You drink it because it’s there and that’s all. I give it points for being there when I need my tea fix. That’s all I can say for it.

I’d rather shoot myself than drink this again.

Only recommended if you’ve been stranded on a desert island for six months, get rescued and the rescuers offer you a cup.

Lipton is for every day, colds, coffee-drinking guests, Desi guests and family, and people who don’t fuss over froofy beverages. I personally like it with honey, milk, cardamom and cloves, especially when I have headaches and fatigue. It is the taste of home.

Say what you want, but this is still what I often think about when I think of “standard” black tea. Sure, there isn’t anything that special about it, but I wouldn’t say it’s bad. There is a certain advantage to being able to enjoy a cup of cheap lipton, because I can buy a box of 100 bags for a few bucks and at least know I can have tea whenever I want, which helps keep me away from other caffeine sources. A perfect “focus on your work” tea companion that keeps you warm and caffeinated, but doesn’t take up your attention.

I’ve had two cups with milk for studying tonight, since I’m between finals (both of which are horrible and terrible and all sorts of other superlatives). I’ll have at least two more before I finish studying. Tomorrow, I’ll take a cup to my molecular biology final to ease my terror of homologous replication.

Had this at a hospital tonight- only choice, but glad that I at least had a choice besides coffee. It was a tea bag (not loose like the picture) and not bad considering that it’s cheap and generic. For basic black tea it seems to be fine- I drank if straight and it tasted pretty good! My mom has been drinking Lipton tea for as long as I can remember, so I do have a “warm fuzzy” about this tea. :)

This tea is very neutral. It will satisfy one’s craving for a hot beverage, but it’s got a rather uninteresting flavor. I think it’s not really Lipton’s fault, though; straight “hot tea” seems to me sort of tame and wimpy, the milquetoast of tea, the lowly shepherd-boy of teas, the palette-cleanser that you would sip between sampling multiple varieties of “worthy” teas. It’s probably better sweetened, or as a meal accompaniment, rather than a stand-alone beverage.

…But it’s tea. So I must soften my review and give it some love. <3.

Today at work I really felt like a having a cup of black tea with milk, and I would have loved a cup of any sort of Irish breakfast tea, but unfortunately my choices were the silver needle and the standard bag of Lipton that we keep at work. I chose the Lipton, it had been ages since I’d had any (I usually bring tea from home), so what the hell, I gave it a try. I usually add lemon to Lipton, so today was a bit different when I added milk. It wasn’t horrible and satiated my craving. As I poured the milk into the cup I was reminded of a coworker who made a cup of tea, and added a creamer to her cup, and upon doing so exclaimed that the creamer was bad! That happens occasionally in the restaurant business, so I told her to just make a new cup of tea. Then she explained that first she added the lemon, and then the creamer. I then explained that when you combine milk and lemon, the milk curdles. Hours later, when making a new cup of tea, I saw her add a creamer to her cup, and then exclaim, “it did it again!”
Me: “did you add lemon?”
Her: “yeah”
Me: “milk plus lemon will curdle every time”

And then I had to walk away.

Undrinkable hot – for me, this is what hot tea tasted like for years, and it is nasty. Iced, it is ok. Would never buy it.

The first thought was, by god this is considered tea?, couldn’t even get through one cup, and through more study found that the leaves actually smell like shreded alfalfa. though that would probably have tasted better.

This is the reason why I long thought that I didn’t like hot tea. OK sweetened and ice cold on ice cubes. But hot? Blech…

yuck, its possible to choke down a cup if u need and its free but dont pay and dont be that desperate. Awfully sweet even with just water, feels very artifical and uncomplex in flavor.

This is the black tea I grew up with, and I liked it until I tried Yorkshire. It’s still ok, but I have to be in a weird mood to drink it and it’s usually as a last resort. It tastes kind of…sour lately, and it’s pretty weak.

I have a box of it, and it’ll get used, slowly.

Everyone seems to hate this tea, But given the choice It may be my second favorite tea still, Granted, I dont brew it for long, and I add lits of sugar. But I still enjoy it if theses nothing else.

As others have said here, this is better than no tea at all, but nothing to write home about. I have a handful of the teabags left from restaurant visits (they bring me two, I use one, pocket the other for later), so I’m trying to be thrifty and use some of it up. At least I started out the morning with one of my favorites before moving to this!

On the plus side, I DO feel healthier drinking this rather than water… I’m sure it’s the antioxidants I’m tasting and not the orange pekoe. Those flavonoids sure are flavorful. XD

I need to help my dad drink all this Lipton Hot Tea so we can use the empty jar for cookies. Or paper clips.

→SKIP←

It’s tea…If you steep it perfectly and simply add sugar, it’s O.K. To be honest this was my gate way into the world of teas, and it’s standard of measurement that’s quickly obliterated once you take a simple step up to bigelow’s. You might ask, “how’d you gain interest into teas from such a dis-favorable label.” well if you add milk, sugar, cinnamon, and honey this tea is rather decent. It didn’t take me long to configure that concoction as I wasn’t very satisfied with the tea itself (even with just sugar.)

So if this is your last resort (or your first introduction to teas as it was for me), get creative and make the best of it; you may choose to delve into the plethora of teas as I did (if you’re on this website you probably already have.) or you may dismiss it entirely as well as any ventures into a class of beverage that is complex and rewarding!

Grandma boiled this one up with heaps of sugar and served on ice. Southern style. It’s not good for you but tastes good.

This one is a classic. The first tea I ever had, though it was decaf back then (mother didn’t want mer 8 year old tea drinking bouncing off the walls I suppose). We use this for everything in my house. Hot, iced, black, lemon, milk with sugar or honey, you name it. When we make a batch of iced tea with this blend, we heat it up in a pot on the stove, often with a few sprigs of fresh mint from the herb garden. If that isn’t available, we’ll add a bag of Peppermint tea to the pot, or Raspberry, or Peach. Usually when we make iced, however, we do use the decaf, because everyone in the house likes to drink it, but not all of us like to be caffeinated that often.

It was the only option yesterday…backlogging…

I think this comic pretty much sums this tea up: http://wondermark.com/557/

I made a pot of this — personally, I like the black tea that comes from the US rather than India, despite the fact that the import tea releases faster. I added milk and a splash of raspberry sugar free Torani syrup. I added a bit too much syrup, but diluted it down with milk and tea as I went along. A little syrup goes a long way….

I will only drink Lipton if I have no other choice. It’s sour and has a lingering astringency that turns me off. It would probably be ok as an iced tea with lots of sugar and lemon, but as a hot tea it’s a last resort.

Great tasting tea for a generic

I hate this stuff. When I went to Japan I was surprised at how much less nasty the Lipton products were. Why, Lipton America?! It’s better than those horrible store-brand tea bags, but still not worth the effort. I’d honestly rather just drink water.

I was going to ice it and mix it with lemonade to make an Arnold Palmer, but then I decided to just drink it hot.

Better, IMO, than their teabags, maybe a little less acidic.

one of the few teas i have with milk. a good standby when i can’t be bothered to fiddle with loose leaf teas, which is not very often.

It’s a cheap, old faithful. I come back to this because I was raised on it. Several of my friends want a tea they can put milk and sugar in, so we find this does a more than adequate job.

Mom’s been drinking it half her life, so this is what I grew up drinking. I still like it.

Iced and mixed with lemonade to make an Arnold Palmer

I’ve got a box of this stuff at my job. It may not be one of my more ‘exotic’ teas, but it definitely makes the day easier for me.

I used to like this stuff until I started drinking loose leaf. Now I sometimes have trouble putting a cup of this down.

This is my “bum a bag off of my cube-mate when my own stash is depleted” option. Good for an afternoon break at work. I’d give it 3.5 stars out of 5.

Good old standby when you need a quick cup.

Standard fare.

the workhorse of teas

This is my favorite basic black tea to fall back on. It tastes best with cardamom, milk, and sugar, and served hot with the milk boiled before it is added.

A tea to drink when you just need a cup, but it is to the better teas like cheap wine is to expensive.

This is a fine tea, but not the same as the similarly packaged Yellow Lipton I really really enjoyed in Pakistan and India. Clearly a different tea mix for a different area. Anyone have any idea how to get the "Asian version of the standard Lipton Yellow Box?

Forgot to bring my own teas to work today, so this will suffice.

I like my tea with a bit of splenda in it. Just something dependable and good for my mornings when I’m in a rush. :)

good and dependable

Lipton’s is pretty basic. Just a mug of boiling water with a teabag. It was all that was available at the time. No great surprises.

One of my all time favorites!

For a tea bag this stuff is pretty good.