Making Iced Tea

My boyfriend loves iced tea. He gets it in restaurants, at fast food chains, from Starbucks, from vending machines, from the gas station fridges... pretty much anywhere where he is getting a non-alcoholic beverage. His main complaint with iced tea though, is that he doesn't like how artificially sweet some of them are.

So, as an impulse buy (I classify it as impulse because I personally take days to research things before I buy them online. He just saw it and used 1-click to buy it), he found and bought an iced tea maker from Amazon. My post-purchase research into reviews seems to indicate that the one he got, the Hamilton Beach Electric Iced Tea Maker, does surpass its competitor by Mr. Coffee. You can use either loose tea leaves or tea bags. It only takes 5 minutes to make 2 quarts, and it is immediately cold and ready to drink. Unfortunately, we could only find bags at our local grocery store and we wanted to experiment with loose tea leaves.

I decided I'd take it upon myself to find him some to buy for him. The best I could find in local stores was some sort of flowery tea at the local Turkish store. I couldn't understand the Turkish on the package though, so I was hesitant about buying it. So I went online. After a little research, the artisan tea pouches at Mighty Leaf Tea. I know I was looking for loose tea, and they do carry loose tea as well (and that's how they came up in my searches), but these pouches really piqued my interest; they contain whole leaves with flowers and fruit rinds and other flavors. I bought three variety packs. Yesterday, the package arrived. We opened up the boxes and it already smelled really good. He picked out the Orange Dulce Black Tea and brewed it. Now, I'm normally not as much of a fan as he is of iced tea (and I've tried it when he brewed other teas with his machine), but this tea was phenomenal. So much so that I ditched my original topic for today to make this post! Now, the machine itself is incredible and the tea really tastes fresh even when you brew the cheap tea pouches, but it wouldn't have been as worthy of a whole blog post without the combination of both the machine and the tea. We can't wait to try the other flavors, which include vanilla bean black tea and their "African Nectar" tea. What's particularly nice is that people who have ordered their teas have written reviews on each different flavor, so you can get an idea of what it would taste like and how much you would like it. They have both caffeinated and caffeine-free teas.

Reading reviews of the iced tea machine, it also says a good option for sweetened tea is to pour sugar on top of the ice before brewing. Apparently placing the sugar here is best for dissolving it and having it mix into the pot of tea. Personally, I'm curious if this can be done with honey. I'll have to investigate that next.