Bottled White Tea

I wouldn't go so far as to say that bottled white tea is becoming all the rage, but there's a lot more of it turning up on store shelves nowadays. Here at TGS we've reviewed the Inko's line of bottled white teas and Anteadote's quite excellent contribution to the sub-category. We've also remarked on - but not yet reviewed - Snapple's new white teas.

Now here comes another beverage giant to offer their take on bottled white tea. That would be Lipton, who recently added five new flavors to their Lipton Original and Lipton Iced Tea lines. One of the new varieties - White Tea with Tangerine.

If you're the type who gets all hot and bothered about the health benefits of tea, then you might want to take a look at this MSNBC article by Today Show food editor, Phil Lempert. It's called - Drink Up: White Tea Is Good For You — Really!

Image: Lipton

tea, food, food and drink, white tea, Lipton, Snapple

Snapple Does White Tea

If you keep up with what others have to say about tea - and I guess I sort of do - then on more than one occasion you'll run across someone idly wondering if tea is the next coffee. Well, I don't know. Maybe it is - maybe it isn't.

If you wanted to apply that same line of thinking to categories of tea you could muse on whether white tea is the next green tea. Once again I don't have any answers for you, but if you look around you'll see more than a few companies trotting out new lines of white tea and promoting them as the healthiest damned thing since...well, since green tea.

But I digress. The point of this particular exercise is to briefly muse on the fact that Snapple, the 800-lb gorilla of bottled iced tea and the official iced tea of New York City, has moved into the white tea game. The company calls the debut of Snapple White Teas - available in nectarine, green apple and raspberry flavors - "the most ambitious product launch in Snapple history."

It should probably go without saying that much is made of the alleged health benefits of white tea, but there I went and said it already.

tea, food, food and drink, white tea, Snapple

Record Price For Kundaly White

Earlier this week, several Indian papers reported that a Kundaly white tea from the Kannan Devan Hills Plantation sold for Rs 1601 per kg. The auction was held in Kochi and the sale represents a record-setting price for this region.

For you American readers, unused to dealing with either rupees or kilograms, this translates to $16.70 per pound or just a bit over $1 per ounce. Which doesn't really sound all that impressive to me, so it may just be that my conversion is off. Hmmm.