Continuing my exploration of grocery store iced teas with another can of Arizona. This time it’s the classic Raspberry flavor.
The second ingredient after ‘black tea’ is high fructose corn syrup. “Raspberry flavor” doesn’t appear until the very end of the list. This must be why the drink feels so heavy and sticky on the tongue. It isn’t so much a refreshing drink as a cloying one. It’s rather concentrated, so I imagine it would taste a lot better with some ice cubes tossed in. But that would require getting ice, and then pouring the drink into a glass, and meh. Too much effort.
At least this tastes like a tea, albeit a not particularly great one. The “Half Iced Tea & Half Mango” drink I tried yesterday barely had any tea flavor at all, although it had plenty of mango juiciness which made it, overall, more pleasant than the Raspberry.
I can’t believe I used to drink these every few days one summer a few years back. How did I not gain twenty pounds from all the sugar?
I always try to snag the honey/ginseng and apple/ginseng whenever they went on sale, but it appears that they may not even carry the latter anymore. Oh well.
Maybe by natural raspberry they mean castoreum, because technically, I guess you can say the flavouring is “natural.” :/
Ha ha, so true about the “natural” flavouring. I have never tried the Arizona ginseng teas, but I am not a huge fan of the taste of ginseng so that is what keeps me avoiding them. I know you can buy crates of the honey ginseng at Costco (my local one anyway). I have never seen the apple ginseng one.
As a side note, there is a ridiculous new “reality” tv show called Appalachian Outlaws about people who (somewhat illegally) harvest ginseng in the US. HA!
From memory, I don’t even think you can taste the ginseng in them, but I guess it depends on how sensitive you are to it. In both, I taste mostly the tea and the sweetness from the honey or apple.
Oh, I heard about that show! Sounds like a great way to waste time haha.