Lipton

Brewed this with nearly boiling water and left teabag in while drinking it hot. I am always looking to try herbal blends. Some of my favorite ‘teas’ are herbal blends. This one looked interesting. Lipton is really hit or miss for drinkability in my book. Their pyramid tea bags like this one tend to be better.

The aroma is pretty good. I smell mint and melon and it puts me in the mood to like the drink. The taste is really more like chamomile and mint equally balanced with a hint of melon. There is a bit of an off taste in the after taste though and I’m not a huge fan of chamomile. But, this is entirely drinkable and a still good option at work when not looking for caffeine.

1)Can someone tell me what rickshaw iron buddha tea is for? 2)Is it just black tea? 3)Is it a slimming tea? 4)Is it for cholesterol? Many thanks.

It’s vile. Liquid chilled preservatives and citric acid. You could clean floors with it. Unfortunately, my husband likes it.

I’m not a Lipton hater—good old basic black loose tea and their pyramid bag series get my thumbs up—but this venture into bottled wasn’t a good one.

I had leftovers from Cheddars for lunch today. Country fried steak, mashed potatoes, and brocolli & cheese casserole. This is new in our area and my goodness is it good. My wife and I ate there for $21 and took some home. She had a mountain of chicken and shrimp. Maybe they raise the prices after they hook you or maybe not. Sure is good though. Their iced tea was very brisk.

I had this tea hot with it today. I could smell the fruit the whole time I was eating. It smells so good. This is my most viewed tea on my blog. If Lipton made a small variety pack I could buy or they had an email where I could contact them I would review a bunch of these – for a simple teabag tea this is very tasty.

I know this is everything a serious tea person is supposed to dislike – a bag of green fannings, and not much of them, and (shudder) its Lipton. I know, but I had one bag of this left, and dog gone it this is an enjoyable cup. I don’t have to think. I don’t have to look for subtleties. All I have to do is set back and enjoy my Jolly Rancher Watermelon Stix in a cup. Happy times.

Yeah I know, its Lipton, but its actually pretty good. While this is no Fusion Tea Superfruit Sencha, it is better than any of the Republic of Teas fruit teas I’ve tried. It is light and at first makes me think pomegranate then the sip turns Jolly Rancher watermelon stick without the heavy sweetness. I’ll have a full review on my blog hopefully in a few days.

It’s taken most of the box of these inexpensive little bags to accept the fact that you let the water get cool to tepid, you drag the bag leisurely through the water 6, definitely no more than 8 times, and that’s it. STOP. Otherwise it gets a bitter barb at the end of the sip.

Self-control in steeping tea. There’s a concept I need to practice…

I have a perpetual wrestling match with this one. I’ve finally figured out the prime timing — about 2 minutes, definitely less than 2 1/2. Now if I can just find the confounded temperature sweet spot. Cold brew doesn’t work; anything hotter than tap water seems to make it bitter.

I want this one to work; it’s got potential and it’s a Cheapster Steepster. But I’ve blown through nearly a third of the little box and not gotten a cup right—at least to my taste buds.

This is a nice little bagged oolong, but I’ve ruined it more than I’ve gotten it right. Today’s goof involved completely forgetting the bag at work—a good 15 minutes later, it could have peeled lead paint off a cast iron stockpot. Gently with this one!

Air Force One just flew over my house. Seriously. Prez in town for high school graduation.

This is a quintessential, solid, inexpensive oolong with a nice little fermented whang to it. Wonderful hot. Not so much cold-brewed. Tried it this afternoon, took a nice big swig after a brisk walk, and the tastebuds said, “oolong…oolong…oolong…OOH.” Went bitter at the end.

So I served it to my spouse, the household over-brewed-meister . He liked it. Hey, Mikey…

A rare just-the-two-of-us excursion for hubby and me yesterday. Springfield, MO. Home of THE Bass Pro Shop (for you outdoor enthusiasts) and a plethora of yummy used bookstores. Lunch at Zio’s…chicken manicotti that’ll put you in an alfredo coma.

And since I spent all my discretionary fundage on books, when we hit the Seoul Oriental Market, I couldn’t not try a new tea, but it had to be a Cheapster. So at $2.15 for 25 bags…why not?

Very little English on the box, so it was a mystery steep. And a nice one! This is a really pleasant bagged oolong. Given oolong-ish parameters (< boiling, about 2 1/2 min), it has a golden oak furniture finish and tastes uncannily like Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit.

The purpose of writing an analysis of Lipton Hot Tea is simply twofold. First, in order to establish a baseline for my analyses (past and present) in order to facilitate the practical utility of my reviews. Nearly everyone, I imagine, has had Lipton Hot Tea at some point, so they can use this review to calibrate their understanding of how I taste, describe, and analyze tea. This makes it easier to relate to other reviews, which are approached in a similar manner. The second purpose of analyzing Lipton Hot Tea is simply for the sake of completeness—it is a tea I frequently drink due to the price and convenience, but even moreso for the incredible adaptability of this tea with regard to the accommodation of additives.

Lipton Hot Tea bags can make nice tea that is very simple to prepare and basically impossible to screw-up. The brew tastes better, I think, the longer the leaves are stewed (at least five minutes) in near-boiling water. The tea lends itself surprisingly well to blending with other additions and spices, as I discuss later. Lipton Hot Tea is a black tea that, in my sample, comes in a box of 100 individually-packaged teabags. The teabags are typical teabags, nothing special.

Deconstructing a teabag, the teabag contains approximately one teaspoon of pekoe-grade black tea. I won’t even attempt to decipher the blend. The leaves are the color of chocolate, mulch, and dried chilies. The average color is the color of dark chocolate shavings, with an occasional straw-colored piece scattered throughout. The fragrance of the dried leaves is slightly sour and malty with a slight sweetness—reminds me of dark rye bread. The texture of the leaves is uniform, dry, and brittle—but they do leave an oily residue when rubbed between the fingertips. The oils released by the dried leaves have a slight vegetal and malty fragrance.

The brewed liquor—when the leaves are stewed for excessive periods of time over five minutes, as I prepare it—has a deep, dark, rusty brown color with a deep, dusty-orange tint. The average color is comparable to some pu-erhs I have had before. The longer and stronger the brew is stewed, the deeper the color, aroma, and flavor becomes, and I don’t find that adding more leaves or over-brewing degrades the product in any way.

The aroma of the brew is malty and vegetal with a metallic sharpness on the front-end that I would be tempted to call “arcane”—but that, perhaps, is too suggestive. It is certainly a unique and sharp aroma (I think the company line is “brisk”) that, to my experience, is unique to Lipton Hot Tea. The aroma of the back-end is smooth and vegetal, in peculiar contrast with the initial sharpness.

When brewed according to my particular mode, the result is very smooth in flavor. (A complete divergence from the flavor profile obtained through a more “conventional” brewing method.) The beginning flavor is smooth and silky with a hint of vegetal, malty and metallic sharpness—and a little sweet. The middle flavors are vegetal, a hint of bitterness, a little metallic, and a sweet maltiness on the tip of the tongue. The aftertaste is slightly vegetal and gently malty and sweet. (In a way, reminds me of a stout—just a little bit.) The overall taste is smooth, rather subtle, and leaves a walnut-like impression, although no flavor component is explicitly “walnut” or “nutty” on inspection. The mouthfeel—especially as the brew cools—is silky, and gives the impression of body.

Because of the subtlety of this tea it is hard to limit the pairing options. In practice, I have paired it with practically everything, and not had anything to complain about. I doubt this tea presents a “best pairing” for any particular dish, but the tea seems very versatile and provides many good pairings. My favorite pairings for this tea include fried foods, yeast-rolls, potato salad, and the tea also acts well as a palette-cleanser after vinaigrette-dressed salads (goes well after anything with vinegar in it, actually), Lasagna, and beer-braised bratwurst with sauerkraut, and the like.

Perhaps my favorite quality of Lipton Hot Tea is its compatibility with additives. I highly recommend infusing any of the following with two or more Lipton Hot Tea bags per 4-6 cups of near-boiling water:
– 1 pod Star Anise
or
– 1 generously-sized sprig of fresh Rosemary
or
– 1 generously sized sprig of fresh Mint (any variety works, including Chocolate Mint)
or
– 1 pod Green Cardamom (seeds removed and crushed gives stronger flavor than stewing the whole pod)
or
– 1-2 stick(s) “Cinnamon” (Cassia)
or
– 1 stick Cinnamon/Cassia + 1 pod Green Cardamom + simmered Whole Milk to taste = a delightful chai! (Although I actually prefer this last recipe with Red Rose, Lipton is still good, and the sharpness enhances the flavor of the Green Cardamom more. For a Lipton preparation, you may wish to add another stick of Cinnamon.)

I fully anticipate there being many other wonderful spice-infusions that can be successfully combined with Lipton Hot Tea, so please experiment! (And please let me know if you find find something particularly eye-opening. I love trying new things.)