Sampling bottled teas (and deciding to stick with my own)

Warmer temperatures mean I'm drinking more iced tea these days, so for fun, I picked up a couple of new-to-me varieties at Ingle's the other day. I actually got the Nestea tea in both peach and raspberry flavors, but I drank the peach flavor on the way home.

Or perhaps I should say that I *tried* to drink the peach tea on the way home. There's no nice way to say this, but their peach tea has to be one of the worst bottled teas I've ever tried, and I've sipped some stinkers. I found myself wondering, "Have the testers ever had tea before? Did they try this out on any actual humans?" I don't like to be negative, but this chemical-tasting murky liquid just seemed to bear no resemblance to actual tea. I was so shocked by how bad it was that I took one more equally dreadful sip just to be sure, and the rest of it went in the trash. I was (and remain) puzzled by how a company could make such an awful-tasting tea. I bravely (or foolishly?) tried the raspberry tea the next day, and it was flat tasting but tolerable, nowhere near as bad as the peach flavor. Lesson learned. No more Nestea for me!

Next I tried the Upload Rainforest Infusions Raspberry, White Grape & Pear White Tea, which was immensely drinkable, although to be fair, it takes like grape juice. Which is good if you like grape juice. In which case, why not just buy grape juice, right? 

Now that that little exercise in tea-tasting is over, I'm sipping a nice black tea I steeped along with fresh mint leaves and then cooled in a pitcher in the fridge before serving over ice. It's so good, I wish somebody would make this tea and bottle it!