Nestea

They were on sale for 88 cents, so why not try it out? There’s nothing much to say. It’s Nestea, and peach. Peach juice crystals. Really sweet but I’ve had much worse.

I just drank half of a 695 mL can of this. The whole can had 22mg of caffeine so I had to split it with someone. The peach flavour is good, but I don’t get a lot of tea flavour. No bitter/acidic notes from the tea though, which is nice. I also appreciate the 88 cent price tag. I find most iced teas are too sweet for me, but I actually don’t find this one too bad.

It is more of a fruit juice than a cold tea, though.

First iced tea of the year! I know it was a bad choice, but the return of the hot weather (and it’s REALLY hot today) caught me unprepared and I reached for the nearest cold thing. It happened to be this, from my parent’s Dolche Gusto machine. The thought also appealed because I’ve had a good few peach teas in the last week or so, and I’ve enjoyed them all, so continuing the peach theme…

This is okay. If you like ultra sweet, ultra artificial iced “tea” then this is perfect. I don’t, really. I mean, I like sweet things up to a point, but this one goes overboard for me. There’s also very little tea in here. It’s the right colour for iced tea, but you can’t actually taste it. I think it’s an “extract” rather than actual tea, given that the pod is full of some kind of powder and sugar, but as the main flavour is clearly supposed to be fake peach then maybe I should have expected that.

I can’t say this was enjoyable as a tea, but as a cold thing on a hot day it ticked one box. I’d not choose to drink it again, though. There are so many better things around.

“Available packages include: 23oz…”

NOOOO! WHY WOULD YOU SUBJECT YOURSELF TO THAT!?

Following my recent “I like white peach flavoured stuff” revelation I decided to break my Nestle boycott (if you want to understand why I’m boycotting Nestle you should take a look at where and how they get their bottled water) and try a can of this, and I just have to say that damn I regretted it so much.

Honestly, I should have known better because it’s fucking Nestle/Nestea we’re talking about but anyway…

This was just painfully sweet though; if you’d put a cup of this “tea” and a cup of the cocktail syrup from a can of peach slivers in front of me I guarantee I would not have been able to tell the difference. And that’s a bad thing. I get that Nestle sweetens their tea; I get that. If they want to appeal to the ‘average’ tea consumer they have to but there are limits!

Secondly, I should be able to tell – at least to some extent, that there’s real “tea” in your “iced tea”. I actually had to go to Nestea’s product page and look up the nutrition information to find out what kind of ‘tea’ this is – the Canadian nutrition label just reads ‘tea extract’ instead of listing the kind of tea. At least the American website listed black tea.

I’m just disappointed; less so in the tea than in myself. I should have known better.

I recently bought my parents a Dolce Gusto machine, and since today has been hot and we’ve been to the coast, I decided to give the Nestea Iced Lemon pods a go this afternoon. The biggest surprise was the thick, creamy foam this develops on top. What’s that all about? I guess it must be something to do with the way the machine works, but it was a little odd. Aside from that, this was an okay sweet lemon iced tea. I know it’s sweetened, and I wouldn’t normally do that, but it wasn’t too overwhelming. The lemon flavour wasn’t quite sharp or strong enough for my tastes, either, but it was also okay. The “black tea” in this is pretty nonexistent, even though the colour is right. It doesn’t really come in to play as an element of the flavour. So all in all, while this is pleasant enough to sip on in hot weather, not to mention convenient because it can be prepared pretty much instantly, it’s never going to be my favourite iced tea. It’s okay, though, and I enjoyed it well enough,

This is refreshing. But that’s about the only thing it has going for it.

I’ve been drinking this for as long as I can remember, dating way back into my childhood. As much of an exaggeration as that may be, Nestea’s Sweet Tea mix stands alone as my go-to cold tea drink whenever I’m at home and there’s nothing comparable in the fridge. It really isn’t half bad once you get past the fact that it’s a powder mix. Sweet enough that you don’t need to add sugar, yet “thin” enough that the taste of lemon tea still comes through. Thanks for always bringing this home from Costco, dad. =P

I’ve been to my littlest cousin’s 7th birthday today. I have been fed a lot of food as well as some hot cocoa, which was nice, and some coffee, which was terribly awfully acidic. Don’t know what brand that was, but definitely not one to my taste. Tea wasn’t offered, and I don’t like making a nuisance of myself about when I am actually fully capable of drinking coffee and there are other beverages available. On the way home I had to switch trains and had a fifteen minute wait for the next train, so I went into the kiosk and got me a bottle of this stuff.

Let’s start with the beginning, the description of the… the… tea, for lack of better word. “A touch of apricot.” A touch? A touch?!!! You’re joking, right? If this is a touch of apricot, then they’ve touched this stuff to a mighty large apricot. I like apricots a lot, though, so I can deal with that.

It also contains not tea, but tea extract, which if you ask my snobby self, although they are both made of tea is no more the same as tea, as raisins are the same as wine in spite of both being made of grapes. (Gosh, what an awkward sentence! You know what I mean, right?)

Let’s not mention the synthetic smell and go straight to the flavour. I can find some tea in it, mostly in the dry astringency, but very little actual tea flavour. Mostly it’s just like a sort of apricotty cordial, though. Sweet, but not too much so, and refreshing too. And definitely not as boring as the wide selection of carbonated soft drinks. Sometimes you just don’t want bubbles, you know?

I’m debating with myself how to rate this, and I have decided that I should rate it primarily on how much I like it on its own terms, because I do think it’s an excellent alternative to fizzy drinks.
If I had rated it on how much I like it in terms of how much I think it had to do with tea, it would have been about a 25.