Pure Iced Tea

This tea is essentially as I imagined it, which is a good thing in this case I think. In most ways it’s just a standard black tea that holds up very well iced (which is not always the case with black teas), and that is all it needs to be. It does not posses a very strong flavor, but its still robust and while its bitter in the way most black teas are its not overly bitter (which is not often the case when you try to make an iced tea out of a blend intended to be made hot).

This is a great simple black iced tea. Waaaaay better than Lipton. At first I steeped it for 3 minutes and that was on the weak side, steeping for 5 minutes made it stronger (as the directions stated, I just like to check after 3 minutes in case it’s a strong tea). I thought the tea had a smooth taste and not bitter at all.

Not my favorite black or my favorite Rishi, but a decent cup a tea. It’s a pretty complex flavor for black tea. The flavor is somewhere between nutty and smokey. I think. It’s a bit hard to describe. I always drink this with a slice of lemon because it tastes like it needs something.

I found one of these hiding in the back of my tea drawer when I cleaned it out last week and just had to make iced tea (even if it is a little to cold yet to sit outside and enjoy it). I really miss this tea and wish Rishi would bring it back. While it isn’t my favorite black tea, it does make excellent iced tea. The bags are oversized, which is much more convenient than using 5-6 bags at a time to make tea, and is what initially attracted me to this when I saw it at World Market several years back. I normally pull this out when we have guests during the summer and always had such compliments about my tea. Definitely much better than Lipton which is what most of them normally drink. I do 2 steepings of this, one at full strength then a second for my guests who like a weaker tea.