Peace Tea Green Tea - Tuesday, Mar. 9th

I also reviewed the Peace Tea Ceylon, Sweet Lemon, and Razzleberry? You haven't read them?! For shame...You should get on that!

Unfortunately, this is the last in the "Interpretive Can" series of Peace Teas. Overall, they've been enjoyable products for their price with, frankly, fantastic cans. Let's not beat around the bush on this one. We leap in with the overall can picture:


As usual, it's got the Peace Tea logo with the hand doing a peace sign (like the Alanis Morissette song). Actually, before I go on with this, what happened to her? Has she done anything in the last 10 years? I just checked Wikipedia. It's looking like a "not really". Anyway, on to the Can-Terpretation (patent pending), brought to you by the letters Cigar and Scotch. First up...disgruntled Asian!

Boyfriend of the Oddly Disfigured Asian Girl on the Razzleberry can (see here), he continues to walk the Earth in a perpetual state of "Damn it all" after his once gorgeous girlfriend has been rendered into a poor interpretation of a female Two-Face. He spends most of his time chain-smoking outside of Starbucks, texting on his phone, and bitching about the good old days back when he had a hot girlfriend on his arm. Up next:


Uhhhh.....yeah. I'm going to take a shot in the dark here and call this one a "Vaguely female Napoleon Dynamite". And by "vaguely female" I mean if you squint and have a few shots of bourbon. It would help if you took your glasses off too. Or put them on, depending on your eyesight. Let's just stick to androgynous, actually. Jury is still out on this one. Next:


What's with all the angry people on this "Peace Tea" can. She looks eight shades of pissed off about something. Her hand is also kind of freaking me out. She's got T-Rex arms. Creepy.

As for the tea, I think this is my favorite of the bunch. The green tea flavor is readily apparent and I can barely tell the sucralose is there. If I was standing in front of a cooler of all four, I'd reach for this one first.

Peace Tea Razzleberry Tea - Wednesday, Feb. 10th

Fun fact: I also reviewed Peace Tea Ceylon, Green Tea, and Sweet Lemon. Go read up on it, holmes!

Another game of Peace Tea Rorschach! This is better than video games, I swear. I wish each can was different, honestly. This can has some pretty awesome things on it. First, we start withhhh:


The chihuahua that stares into my soul. Creepers. It actually reminds me of Scrappy-Doo, everyone's least favorite Hanna-Barbera cartoon right after Penelope Pitstop, the stupidest concept for a cartoon ever. Ever. We move across the can to:


The Oddly Disfigured Asian Girl. After a mysterious chemical explosion in her college's research lab, Oddly Disfigured Asian Girl is on a quest to find the evildoer who sabotaged her work and cost her a face so pretty it makes Christina Hendricks look like shit in a paper bag. A paper bag that is on fire. Next is the ever present celebrity endorsement:


To me, it looks like Nick Nolte and Mickey Rourke ran headlong into a brick wall and then were surgically fused together in order to save both their lives. Either that or a redheaded version of an 80 year old Kurt Russell. Take your pick.


Finally, the obligatory "What the Hell" moment. What is it, you ask? My interpretation is a suspended chile pepper and a panda wearing a Monster Energy bandanna. Awesome.

As for the tea, this is (so far) the best. The sucralose flavor is non-existant, the raspberry flavor is pronounced and quite nice. The sugar means its not overbearingly sweet and it's damn quaffable. I recommend this, on top of the sweet can artwork. Of course, my school has stopped carrying these wonderfully cheap canned delights and has reverted to Honest Teas, which are about 1.50 more. I'll review that soon. Like...tonight.

Peace Tea Sweet Lemon Tea - Thursday, Jan. 21st

Hey, did you know I also reviewed Peace Tea Ceylon, Green Tea, and Razzleberry? You should probably check 'em out.

Oh goodie goodie gumdrops! It's time for another Peace Tea Rorschach test! Interpreting what the drawings on the can are is half the fun of this beverage. The other half is the fact that it's actually decent for 99 cents and it uses real sugar. But first, the pictures.

Alright, here we go. Here's a frontal view of the can. This time, instead of the cool cyan blue they had for the Ceylon tea, we get a bright and cheerful yellow. Yay! But wait kids, the fun hasn't begun yet, let's play "Guess the Characters!" First we have....



This little guy kinda reminds me of either an oddly shaped, semi-humanoid Muppet (think a young Waldorf) or Danny from The Shining after a few "special" brownies. Yeesh. Next up?

A very thirsty grandma! Long day of watching Matlock? Need a small pick me up before that bridge game with the gals at the senior center? Don't want coffee but don't feel like getting the caretaker to brew a cup of tea? Slam down a can, ya old bat! It'll make ya feel alive and your mouth lemony fresh! The best part? It's actually a bearded guy with a mohawk. I love these damn cans. Finally, last but not least, we have a celebrity endorsement:


That's right, ladies and gentlemen. Charles. Bronson. Promoting from beyond the grave. Good gravy, I love these damn cans.

As for the tea, who the hell cares? No no, I kid. It's not too bad. The sucralose flavor is pretty much masked by the lemon flavor which doesn't taste completely natural but also doesn't taste like watered down Pledge either. Honestly, I would recommend these more for the can than what's inside. Which, I'm sure, will make my friend Ryan very, very happy.

Peace Tea Imported Ceylon - Wednesday, Dec. 30th

I've also done reviews of the Green Tea, the Razzleberry, and the Sweet Tea. Since they're linked for your convenience, I'm pretty sure you have to read them now. Besides, the other ones have my interpretations of the can art. 

I love iced tea. I love tea in general but iced tea is an especially fond portion of my beverage consumption. I am, by blood, almost half Scottish so a good deal is also something I'm especially fond of finding. Enter canned iced tea. Arizona puts out about 20,000 kinds of canned iced tea (including the Arnie Palmer, the greatest beverage in the world) in a huge 23 fl. oz. can. All for a whopping buck. $1. One greenback, one smackeroo.

Needless to say, they rank high on my list of Awesome Quaffables.

However, one thing that bothers me about Arizona is they love to use HFCS, or high-fructose corn syrup. It's not that I don't like drinking it because I'm afraid it's bad for me and it'll make me fat (I'm a beverage reviewer and I'm already fat), it's mainly because I don't like the mouth-feel it gives beverages and, honestly, HFCS is generally just too damn sweet. So, while walking through the grocery store I saw a beloved 23 oz., $1 can of tea and I reached for it. But it wasn't Arizona. It was a company called Peace Tea.



As you can see above, the artwork on the can is pretty cool. There's a hand giving a peace sign (obligatory) as well as a guy that looks like Merlin, an Indian chick, a guy in the background that looks like an Oompa Loompa wearing a red chef's hat, a cow, and Clark Kent at 50 off in the far corner. I'm gonna hedge my bets on this is supposed to be the local people of Ceylon. For the record, I want to live there if it means living near Merlin and a neon-blue cow. Anyway, the tea itself is pretty good. The color isn't thin and watery looking, it's thick and rich like a good brewed tea. The smell itself is pretty muted but it smells like a black tea (albeit not a very fine one). But the best part of this beverage is that it's made with real, honest-to-goodness cane sugar. Om nom nom! This tea comes so close to perfection I can almost taste it. Almost. The first sip is glorious: ice cold, perfectly brewed tea with the fresh sweetness of real sugar and just a hint of citrus bite from citric acid. Then the last bit hits. This sickly sweet, chemical-like sweetness.

Fuuuuuuck.

The last ingredient in this tea is made with my bane of manufactured sweetners: sucralose. You know this by its brand name of Splenda. I hate Splenda solely because the first taste of Splenda dupes you into thinking its sugar, then the aftertaste is like the baby of HFCS and a gallon of methanol. It's this sickly sweet artificial taste that kills it. And this tea doesn't have a lot of it, but just enough to piss me off to levels I've never been to before in my life. If it didn't have the sucralose in it, I would just start funneling this into my body as quick as I could buy cans. But Captain Splenda has to come in and give me a big 'ole "Screw you, buddy" and then leave me with a can of tea that could have been so very perfect.

So, yeah. This is a thinly veiled rant against manufactured sweeteners. I hate them and my degree is probably responsible for creating them. Sweet-N-Low, Splenda, Nutrasweet...they all need to burn. HFCS needs to be dropped into the deepest mineshafts the world has. Plain brown sugar or agave syrup are the best things to sweeten things with, bar none. Oh, and maple syrup. That stuff is great.