Southern Boy Teas

Okay when I got to the page for this…Razzle Dazzle from Chicago got stuck in my head.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YW3MIixEps4

Raspberries and blackberries are my favorite berries so I love this tea. It tastes like ripe, crushed berries were poured through my tea before I drank it…if only I had the berries. Nothing artificial about the flavors, just the taste of summer berries.

I got some awesome blackberries a couple weeks ago but I was donating them to some bears so I only got to eat one. I love saying that because it sounds absolutely ridiculous and actually I have no idea what animals got to eat them..but I hope it was the bears. If I had some of them to go with this tea, I would be in fruit heaven right now.

I added a bit of agave to the first cup just to see if it made any difference, but I liked it more just the way it was. It tastes more like candy if it’s sweetened though, which may be a positive depending on your tastes.

I love love love the black tea base in these bags so much. Even though this is only the third one I’ve tried so far (I have all the rest of the flavored ones so far, I just ordered radioactiviTEA though), it really is perfect. It goes with every flavor beautifully in a delicious balance.

Last tasting note until Sunday or Monday, I’m so excited to go to Florida even if it’s for not even 48 hours, ahhh! Of course, a couple orders arrive tomorrow. I hope they get put in a locker and not taken to the front office so I can’t have them till Monday, that would be sad.

This note is for the second steep of the teabag. If you want to resteep one of these, but don’t want a gallon of tea in your fridge at once because you can’t drink it all up in a couple days, it works really well to freeze the concentrated 2 cups for a couple days until you’re ready to drink more! If I had space for extra ice cube trays that would be perfect. You could just throw them in some water and be set to go pretty quickly.

But in my case I created a giant ice cube, let it melt a bit so I could just pop it into the pitcher, filled it up with water, and let it melt down to mostly all liquid for already cold tea! I’ve got one bottle to take with me on the road tomorrow and I’ve nearly had the rest to drink already today, wow.

I sweetened it before I froze it, but I think this steep actually tastes better than the first anyway. The banana is more subtle and sweetening doesn’t bring it to the point of candy. I think it makes it taste even more like real banana this time around. I will definitely get this one again!

Well, I got my haircut. Except instead of layers, I got Megan Draper a la Mad Men. Bah. Nice lady and all but seriously I said I wanted layers. I guess she was too busy yelling at me for bleaching part of my hair that was basically all cut off.

Thankfully I don’t mind it and my day was made better by more SBT bags coming in the mail, yay! I was feeling like banana so I decided to have this one.

It’s somewhat subtle, which I like because banana is a pretty difficult flavor. Too much tastes like candy and it seems like it’d be really hard to get a natural tasting flavor. Of course, if banana candy is what you’re after, give it a good bit of sweetener, and you’ve got it. I thought it was pretty good with nothing added because the banana just tasted so good with the black tea. But with a good bit of agave, it’s even more banana tasting with a candy aftertaste.

Love it! Definitely going to give this bag another steep. I should have about 2 quarts of bottles to take with to Florida this weekend then and I can just put this all in them hahaha. I just steeped it up and once it cools I’ll pop the 2 cups in the freezer until Thursday. This had me worried though, when I go up to North Carolina for 5 days WHAT AM I GOING TO DO??? The water there is horrid, I think there’s a hot water dispenser in the lobby but I am still terrified to use it with legitimate tea instead of the cheap tea bags I recall them having. I guess it might be cold steeping in the cooler with water bottles up there!

I should also add this is even better after its spent the night in the fridge. Even more banana flavor without the need of any sort of addition! Now I imagine if you REALLY wanted banana runts, you could add sweetener and it’d taste like them. Awesome!

Just made a pitcher of this at home. It’s another blistering day in Wichita. This is unmistakably banana. I’m thinking the black tea base maybe takes some of that Laffy-Taffy/Runts flavor away and makes it a bit less artificial tasting. To me, it’s just the right hint of sweetness in an awesome black tea without actually BEING sweetened. My wife prefers her iced tea with Splenda and insists this is amazing that way (too sweet for me, but to each their own).

I reallly love the ease of these teabags. I’m getting some samples of different pillow pack bags in to consider for the next round. As cute as these little bags are, they were a bear to get the teabags into.

Thinking about the teabags makes me a little sad. I would love to be able to share our teas with LOTS of people on a much larger scale. The truth is, it is VERY difficult to compete with the big teabag companies. The level of automation they employ and the economies of scale they enjoy are just unbelieveable. At one point I calcluated that to keep my labor costs in line, I needed to be able to produce 80 teabags an hour, weighed, filled and sealed—which was challenging. But if I had $40k, I could buy a weigh-fill-seal machine, fill a hopper with tea and hang up a roll of teabag filter paper and it would make 160 teabags a MINUTE for me. That’s twice my hourly goal in a MINUTE!

Oh well. I spend entirely too much time looking at Youtube videos of industrial equipment. LOL. Maybe someday we could get a bunch of purchase orders from some grocers and take them to the bank and say, “Please, can you help us join the industrial revolution?” Or maybe we’ll crowd source a Form Fill Seal machine though our awesome customers and Kickstarter or one of those sites.

Okay. I’m rambling now. Anyway. The tea is hitting the spot on this very hot day. I hope everyone is having a good Friday and staying cool with some nice iced tea.

Our AC is on the fritz and I think this tea is keeping me sane. It is just an amazing iced tea. A perfect rich tea and then you get that cotton candy finish, and it just makes you happy. Does me anyway. The teabags make it easy too. I just put the teabag in my 2quart pitcher, pour in a bit of boiling water from my tea kettle, and three minutes later, top it off with cool water and pluck the tea bag out for round two later. (Second steep is just as awesome as the first.

Back to my selection of SBTs for today’s cold brew! This is another I first tried last year, and as far as I can recall I really liked it. I’m pleased to report that I like it just as much the second time around. The pink lemonade flavouring is easily detectable — it’s a sort of generically sweet, slightly fizzy tasting, maybe very slightly strawberry/lemon tinged flavour. It’s just like actual pink lemonade! The base is smooth and unobtrusive — it’s the characteristic 52 Teas SBT base, so if you’ve ever tried one before you know exactly what to expect. Brewed at the recommended parameters — 3 minutes in boiling water, topped up with cold to 2 litres and into the fridge overnight — it’s a delicious treat on a warm day. These teas do make work far more bearable!

Another awesome iced tea! I’ve said it before, but I’m really, really impressed with these. This one is no exception. As soon as I opened the packet, I could smell Pink Lemonade, just as I remember it from my childhood. From the first sip, this tastes almost exactly like Pink Lemonade too, only with less sugar and the bonus of being in tea form. I’m glad Frank pointed out that there’s cotton candy flavouring in the mix here, because I could taste that almost immediately and I probably would have been a bit confused! It’s the cotton candy that provides the “pink” here, I think (ooh, rhyme!!), which is them complimented beautifully by a relatively strong, but not bitter or overpowering, lemon taste.

This is another one of those flavours I would have thought it shouldn’t be possible to recreate as tea. Apparently it is, though! This is the perfect choice for the hot, summery day that today has become. It’s sweet, tasty, refreshing, and it’s one of the only cold drinks that keeps my caffiene cravings at bay! I don’t know how I managed before I found these. They’re simply amazing! Great work, Frank!

I made 2L of this before I went camping for the weekend. Smells very much like banana candy or liquor or any banana flavoured thing you can think of, both before and after steeping. Sadly, a lot of the flavour is lost. I know that smell contributes a great amount to our sense of taste but my tongue really didn’t get an awful lot of banana. I gave some to my partner to try without telling her what it is and she could not identify that it was a banana tea. So there.

Brewed as per instructions, bag in 2 cups of boiling water, added cold water to complete a 2 quart (translation: 2 litre) pitcher.

If I could rate on smell alone, Booyah, it is out of the park banana. Flavour disappointing, sorry. I now have the bag cold steeping, we’ll find out tomorrow if it is more flavourful.

6 days later

I resteeped the bag with cold water in the fridge for over 24 hours. Sweetened with agave. It has more flavour this way but still quite subtle. The banana is more in the aftertaste.

This was today’s iced tea for work. It got the usual SBT treatment.

I’ve tried this one before, and I noticed that this time the banana wasn’t as strong BUT it was more natural tasting. Less like banana runts, and more like an actual, slightly under-ripe, banana. Work is totally manic so I didn’t pay much more attention to it than that. Safe to say, I enjoyed it and it’s still one I’d repurchase once I’ve worked through my hoard. Great stuff!

Today’s iced tea of choice. I’m sad that I didn’t get chance to try the honeybush version of this tea, but there you go. If this is anything to go by, it would have been amazing. You can probably already tell this this is a winner with me. It tastes exactly like fresh banana, none of this fakey artificial stuff here. There’s even something a little “green” about it, the taste that banana has when it’s not brown and over-ripe, but just approaching perfection. I think it’s pretty amazing how Frank manages to recreate flavours like this in tea form. No other brand I’ve tried has ever really managed to equal these iced teas.

As ever, the black base here is smooth and unobtrusive. It just supports the flavour perfectly, and adds a little bit of depth to the taste. It’s not too strong, it’s not at all astringent. For me at least, it’s just right. It’s a good thing no-one’s asked me what I’m drinking today. I rave about tea a little bit, if I’m given the chance, but I couldn’t tell the humourless people I work with that I’m drinking Monkey Fart. Such is life. Have to say, though – this is ace tea! I love banana almost unreservedly, from those foam banana sweets to banana milkshake, via all manner of desserts, right along with the real thing. Knowing this, it’s probably not surprising that I like this so much! It’s good, though. Really good. As a bit of a banana maniac, you can take that from me.

Basic math seems to be eluding me – I keep oversweetening this tea since I can’t seem to remember to half the sugar when you half the gallon.

So I made this half gallon too syrupy and I’ll remedy that by boiling up another half gallon and diluting it – the lime, raspberry and orange flavors are fantastic iced and I don’t want to waste any of it now that the weather is perfect for iced tea!

Iced tea season is never REALLY over for me, but the weather is changing enough that I’m wanting to reach for hot tea about as often as cold.

This is still as awesome as the first time I had it iced – it has a creaminess without needing any additives and the sherbet really pops with my typical iced tea ratio of sugar.

I have a couple of these left and I’ll be hoarding them.

So I feel like I need to be honest with you guys: I curse like a sailor in real life.

I say that because my initial utterings upon tasting this tea are not, well… they don’t seem necessarily appropriate to say in a public forum. I meant it in a really, really good way though. Promise!

The first word that came to mind (after the expletives, haha) was whoa. This tea is soooo creamy. Tangy, fruity, and creamy, just like sherbet. I’m pretty weird in that I don’t actually like ice cream/sherbet/sorbets because a lot of the time its too sweet. Also I prefer to drink cold things, not eat them, and I don’t necessarily find milky things to be that refreshing when the weather is hot. I’m a right ball of fun, I know.

So that this manages to somehow sidestep all of my ridiculous criteria is pretty miraculous.
It’s got a creamy full texture which tea usually just doesn’t have on it’s own. The only way I get this texture in tea normally is by adding milk, but iced tea is not something you can add milk to (Ew. just the thought of that…) It tastes like ice cream without being ice cream. And I’m drinking it on its own, without a meal – it’s like dessert!

Um, LOVE. I hope I can get another 2 quarts out of this… but even if not I just went ahead and put one of each of the SBT iced tea flavors in a shopping cart because MY MOUTH IS SO HAPPY.

Thank goodness I saw that discount code when I did!

In regards to SBT ice cream flavoured iced teas, I think this one is better than the Neapolitan.

I made this one as per the directions on the package.

The dry tea bag smells deliciously like rainbow sherbet. It smells sweet but also that slight little bit of tartness that sherbet has.

The brewed tea tastes very similar to SBT cotton candy. You can tell that the taste is rainbow sherbet but the taste is not as strong as the smell. I find for the SBT iced teas, this one is much of a lighter taste, its not bad that is light, its just not in your face. You can taste the black tea, but it is not too strong and the flavouring works well with the tea. It is very refreshing. I did not add any sugar to this one.

Edit: Resteeped. Made an excellent resteep. Tastes pretty much the same as the first steep. I added some rock sugar this time around. It did sweeten it up a bit. Brought out the smallest amount more of rainbow sherbet taste. I am thinking this one would be excellent with a lot more sugar added. I’m just not in the mood for that today.

This is my first iced tea of 2015! I tried this one for the first time last summer, and it was so good I went back straightaway for another pouch. I was a bit of a Southern Boy Teas doubter at first, because I didn’t see how tea could taste of ice cream or sherbet, jello or bubblegum. Somehow, though, they do, and this one is no exception.

I brewed this one up the way I usually do – the bag gets 2 minutes in 1/4 litre of boiling water, which is then topped up to 1.8 litres with cold water and put in the fridge overnight. I usually drink half a jug a day (so just under a litre), and as the tea bag is good for a second brewing, these teas represent great value for money. More important than that, though, is the flavour! This one is out of this world! The sherbet is creamy, fruity, and even a little effervescent tasting. I can detect flavours of raspberry, orange, lemon and lime by turns, although they’re not particularly distinct. Just tiny flashes that skip across my taste buds and are gone. Ultimately, the individual fruit flavours merge together into a generically sherbet-y taste. However it’s done, it’s truly amazing.

See my full review here: http://sororiteasisters.com/2015/06/11/rainbow-sherbet-iced-tea-southern-boy-teas/

This is my first iced tea of 2015! I picked this one out for a couple of reasons – it’s one of my old favourites, and I’ve got a 2oz pouch of the black version of this tea tucked away, so it won’t really be gone from my cupboard until I can place another order. Given the quantity of tea I actually possess, I won’t need to place an order for a serious amount of time. So that accounts for the choice.

I gave this my usual SBT treatment. The bag gets 2 minutes in 1/4 pint of boiling water, which is then topped up to 1.8 litres with cold water and put in the fridge overnight. I really do think in mixed metric and imperial like that, too. It’s one of my peculiarities.

Half of the jug came to work with me this morning, so there’s some left in the fridge at home for tomorrow. That’s a good thing, because the flavour is out of this world! The sherbet is creamy, fruity, and even a little effervescent tasting. I can detect flavours of raspberry, orange, lemon and lime by turns, although they’re not particularly distinct. Just tiny flashes that skip across my taste buds and are gone. I wouldn’t have thought it possible to replicate sherbet in tea form (or liquid, come to that) but Frank has somehow managed to pull it off. I’ve gushed about this one before, so I’m going to stop now and round off by summing up my thoughts about this tea:

It’s magic.

You need to try some.

Another amazing iced tea. I’m really on a roll with these, I think! I’m definitely glad I decided to give them a chance, anyway, because they’re going to make my summer.

Thanks to Sil, I tried a sample of the original Rainbow Sherbet black tea a little while back. Needless to say, I loved it. Sherbet is a favourite of mine, and it actually tasted just like sherbet. So does this.

It’s maybe not quite as sherbet-y as I was hoping, but the flavour is still definitely there. As with some of the other SBTs, the beautifully smooth black tea base comes through first, with sherbet emerging more towards the end of the sip. I can pick out the orange, lime and raspberry individually, and then they seem to merge together into a generically sherbet-y taste. There’s something here that makes this taste specifically sherbet-like, and I can’t quite pinpoint what it is. It has a sort of creamy, almost fizzy taste, without actually being either. However it’s done, it’s truly amazing.

I was a bit of a doubter at first, because I didn’t see how tea could taste of ice cream or sherbet, jello or bubblegum. Somehow, though, they do. This one is no exception, and it’s another all-round great taste experience. I will definitely, definitely be buying more or these. They’re just too good to miss!

I had a bit more of this tonight while relaxing with my other half after some much required running around today. We got to sit and watch some Hannibal so that was nice. :) My opinion hasn’t changed much on this…it’s decent but not out of this world and i might as well make other teas cold brewed since i’ve got lots in the house rather than buying these packs :) Still though…maybe an option for when i get my cupboard back down.

more of this tonight…because it’s hot. and annoying. and my fan is broken and i have to work in 30 mins. again. bah. bah! BAH!!

I picked this up a little while back with a small shared order I placed with frank just to try. I figured this would be a good one to try today in light of his “canada day sale.” I brewed this up in the morning before my other half and i headed out for a bike ride for the afternoon so that we could have this when we got back as a refreshing “not just water” fluid to rehydrate. I’m always super thirsty when i get back even though we always pack gatorade as well as a camelbak full of water.

I have to say as far as iced teas go, i was a little disappointed with this one. Not because it’s bad, but because i wanted it to be so much more because of how convenient the bags are that frank has put together. On the plus side i did get two steeps out of the bag, and could likely also have a third if i wanted to top off the first and second one.

This one tastes well enough, though i did have to add sugar to it for the flavours to pop enough for me to really like them. I like the berry ness of this one, though i think i’d probably prefer maybe lime jello or the pink lemonade. Highly tempting just to see how they fare. I’m a big fan of the convenience in frank’s bags, as long as you know to be careful opening them :)

I kind of forgot to set the timer for this one, but I think it was steeped for about 3 minutes. The dry leaf aroma is a lovely black tea that screams I WANT TO BE MADE INTO ICED TEA!!! I poured myself a glass and added sweetener. The verdict? This tea is much mellower than I was expecting. It brews up very dark, so I was a little intimidated at first.

But I’m on my second glass now! This tea is very smooth and flavorful. If you like unflavored iced tea, this is the one for you! It’s a nice balance of bold and smooth. Personally, I prefer the flavored SBTs. This isn’t bad by any means. It’s just not very exciting, and I love how creative and unique the SBT line is. This was nice for a change of pace though.

Made this one today and it’s already more than half way gone. I think this is one of my new favorite flavors. It’s sweet but not too sweet. It has a lovely sweet and fluffy cotton candy flavor. Mmm I should have added this to my order D:

This one is SO GOOD! I think this is the best SBT I have tried so far. On first taste I thought this one tastes very similar to SBT cotton candy, but with a bit of raspberry candy taste. Then I read the description and learned I was dead on. Ha ha (I got it right for once). I definitely get a pink lemonade taste in the after taste.

I brewed this one in 2 cups boiling water for 3 minutes then added ice and cold water. I added 2 tsp sugar to the whole 2 quarts of tea.

It so hot out right now, I was thinking I am going to enjoy this one all weekend, but I doubt it will last that long.

Edit: Re-steeped. This one is actually better on the re-steep! The flavours are still strong and I get much more pink lemonade flavour.

I bought a teabag of this on a whim with my first 52Teas order (yay!) because I seem to love all things lime (I’m a huge lover of Davids Tea Lime Gelato). Lucky for me, this one is totally different than Lime Gelato so I don’t have to compare.

First off, the black tea base is absolutely splendid and much more flavourful than your typical black tea base for a flavoured tea (from your “normal” tea places like teavana and DT). Secondly, that lime is subtle! Wowza! I absolutely love this. It’s like the best twist on a traditional iced tea. I choose not to sweeten mine (just a preference) and in fact I added more water to my pitcher than recommended.

Phenomenal. Will enjoy till the last drop!