Two of the best years of my life were spent in the college town of Chapel Hill in North Carolina. There I learned many, many things about my southern brethren that were unknown to me before. Chief among them was their love of sweet tea. Every single restaurant down there had sweet tea. I quickly found out that a well made (usually homemade) sweet tea was like liquid crack. One day while perusing the aisles of my local Shaw's supermarket I stumbled upon Sweet Leaf The Original Sweet Tea and knew I had to try it.

Value

At $1.59 for 16 fluid ounces, this bottle of sweet tea is not cheap. Granted, it's not super-expensive either but it's certainly not cheap, especially considering I could probably make 4-5 times as much of my own sweet tea for the same price. Still, it is quite tasty and very refreshing when served cold. Part of that price includes the glass bottle, and I'll certainly pay a little bit more for glass over plastic. It might not be cheaper than other bottled teas, but it's for sure a heck of a lot cheaper than a trip to North Carolina!

Plus, a bottle of The Original Sweet Tea supplies you with 12% of your daily iron requirement, so it's not all empty calories and sugar.

Score: 3 / 5

Look refreshing? It was...

Quality

The bottle says "Homemade Goodness in a Bottle" and I will give credit where credit is due and admit this is the closest in taste to the south's sweet tea I've found up north. It's still not quite as good as some of the homemade sweet teas I've had but for a mass produced product, it's as close as we're gonna get. It is authentic sweet tea, as it's made in Austin, Texas, but it just lacks that freshly brewed and poured out of a big cool pitcher homemade taste.

Score: 4 / 5

Innovation

Sometimes the taste of a food item goes beyond just the ingredients. Such is the case with Sweet Leaf, as their labels and web-site are adorned with a nice cartoonish image of Granny, who if you ask any Southerner is for sure the master of sweet tea in any household. I'm dead serious too, there are many families who have been passing down their sweet tea recipes for several generations now.

More importantly, Sweet Leaf uses organic ingredients and keeps their recipe simple (water, tea, cane sugar, and citric acid). Sometimes simple and natural is innovative in itself. Such is the case here.

Score: 4 / 5

Social Benefit

Well, sweet tea is certainly not the healthiest of beverages but if more people drank sweet tea instead of what the soft drinks and alcohol they're drinking now we'd be a lot healthier of a nation! Moderation, as always, is key and if you have a sweet tea every now and then it's not going to destroy society as we know it. On the other hand, the pollution released by shipping so many bottles all over the world for something that we can all make at home isn't the best thing for society either.

Sweet Ol Granny makes some sweet tea...picture via Sweet Leaf Tea web-site

On the other hand, Sweet Leaf uses organic ingredients. They also help charities and non-profits, such as Big Brothers Big Sisters, Multiple Sclerosis Society and Breast Cancer Research. Sweet Leaf is a relatively small company and looks like a nice place to work at too.

Score: 3 / 5

Freestyle!

As I wrote in the introduction, good homemade sweet tea is like liquid crack. When I moved back up north to Boston I couldn't help but fiend for some good sweet tea every now and then. Thankfully, Sweet Leaf's Original Sweet Tea handles those cravings well. Now, someone born and raised in the South may disagree with me, but I think this sweet tea is damn, damn good. Pour me another!

Score: 18 / 22

The Original Sweet Tea by Sweet Leaf is available at Stop & Shop, Shaw's and many other supermarkets.

Complete Score: 32 / 42 = 76.2%