"MaryAnna's Summer Sweet Tea is a perfect balance of flavors, blending rich, fragrant black teas with pure cane sugar and 1000% lemon juice for the optimum iced tea experience." -- from the MaryAnna's Tea website

Picture a perfect Sunday. Good late breakfast and conversation with three lovely friends, then a Costco run with the cute one of the three. (Don't tell him I said that!) Good company turned tedium into giggling fun. We finished waiting in line, and I headed out to transfer a cartload of groceries into my trunk. That's when things started to go a bit sour.

I don't do heat well. After several bouts with heat exhaustion, my tolerance is about five minutes and then I need to head for shade, coolness and liquids. Loading the car in the afternoon sun left me tired and sweaty. I know women are supposed to glow, but I felt like an abused stevedore. It was a very warm desert spring day and I was HOT. I started the drive home, leaning into the air conditioning vents and swigging warm water from the car's emergency jug. That helped a little, but not much. I was halfway into the 40-minute trip before I started to feel a bit cooler, and then, not enough.

I stumbled on home. All I could think about was ice and liquid. I planned on iced water, which was fine with me, but it was taking me a few minutes to get to the kitchen to assemble it, and I was more tired with every second it took to get there. I finally made it and that was when I remembered this tea in the refrigerator. I had gotten the bottle in the mail the day before, and I wanted to wait for it until the time was right. Well, boys and girls, the time was more than right.

It's not like bottled iced tea needs an owner's manual (after all, you're really just renting it), but I inadvertently and exactly followed the directions on the bottle. "Fill a nice tall glass bursting with ice and indulge in a simple, healthful pleasure. Taste the difference real tea makes." I poured the tea into the ice, settled into a comfortable spot, and took a big swallow.

My internal temp dropped about 10 degrees. I stopped hyperventilating. I could see colors again. And I realized that this wasn't just cold, tea-flavored liquid. This was genuinely good tea that just happened to be chilled and on ice, and originally from a bottle. And it had the power to turn me back into a functioning human.

Let's put this into perspective. If you gave your grandmother a bottle of iced tea, she would taste it, make a face, wag a finger, and go make something much better. But, even your grandmother would use tea bags. Not MaryAnna's. The flavor is good loose leaf tea, followed by sugar and lemon, not just a tea-colored, vaguely sweet, fake tea, tannic, lemony liquid. Sweetness preferences in tea are very subjective, but I loved this one, it was spot on for my taste. It was very much a "sweet tea" in the southern sense, with lemon added. The real sugar made a perceptible and very nice difference. The tea base was excellent, a classy black Nilgiri. The nicest part was that the tea flavor lingered, so my first taste was tea, then icy tea with sugar and lemon, then a lingering taste of the tea at the back of my throat, a spicy but mild tannic complexity, a peppery-sweet, rounded flavor. It's usually difficult to balance cold flavors in the mouth, but this blend manages that feat well. I was a tad doubtful about the lemon, which was "100% lemon juice from concentrate," but it worked perfectly. This was good, honest iced tea, made with REAL tea.

I found myself savoring each sip, swirling it around my mouth before swallowing, then waiting for the next, to give myself time to enjoy every nuance. When I had finally finished it, I continued to let the ice melt at the bottom of the cup, so that I could drink the flavors that were left in the melted ice. That probably went on for another hour.

I finally had the last of the tea flavored melt and filled the glass back up with water. I could still taste the tea, which was exactly what I was hoping for. This bottled iced tea was a pleasure from start to finish. I found myself wishing I lived in New Jersey(!), because this is a very local brand, carried only at seventeen New Jersey locations. Or, by mail order. At $32.95 for a case of a dozen 16.8-oz. glass bottles, it's a bit pricey, but I was quite pleasantly surprised to find that shipping is free. Since it cost them upwards of $10 to send me one sample bottle, I find that a more than generous offer.

If you have the money, spend it and get hooked. For taste alone I would give this bottled iced tea a good solid 8.5. If you live in or near New Jersey, this is definitely an 8.5. Because I live in California, I would say more like a 7.5. For price and lack of availability I'm going to knock off a bit, but I'm not honestly sure that having a bigger operation wouldn't change the quality of the tea. So, enjoy it as it is, with all its difficulties. It's worth the effort and the money.

— To purchase MaryAnna’s Summer Sweet Tea, or for more specific information on ingredients or the story behind this particular blend, click here to go directly to the manufacturer's web site.

Patty Teaviews.com Reviewer » Read more about this reviewer on Patty's profile page. » Find a list of recent posts by Patty.

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