Steaz Green Tea Sodas

Review

This is the drink that showed me that I can love "tea beverages". I have normally been wary of bottled/canned tea blends that pit tea versus other ingredients in a battle of the "anti-oxidants" versus flavor. Apparently, and this is a guess, green tea tastes like crap to most people and so most bottlers toss in a weak splash of tea to get the health quotes on the bottle and then pour on the syrups and the fruit flavors and the preservatives. I found Steaz one day without putting much thought into it. I was in Garden Cove's checkout line (a great little grocery story in Huntsville, AL: highly recommended) and picked up a bottle of their root beer. And after drinking that, I was in love with the taste and the concept.

It is like soda, but it's not soda. It's sweetner is a natural hit of organic cane juice (a bottle sports about 135 on the calorie mark). Each 12 oz bottle has the equivalent of 8 oz of organic green Ceylon, which seems to be high and above the scant amounts that most ready-to-drink tea-based beverages have. It does have sparkling water for a carbonation kick, but somehow they found an excellent blend so that you get the fizz but just the right amount. And it comes in all sorts of flavors: key lime, grape, ginger ale, cola, root beer, cream soda, etc. On top of all that, you get organic and fair trade ingredients in easy to recycle glass bottles or cans.

My favorite is the root beer, definitely. It manages to have both the classic root beer flavor and the taste of Ceylon green (not my favorite tea, but an excellent tea to background other flavors). I've also tried some of the fruit varieties and they are good, too. I definitely plan to keep trying these.

It gets a Great for a rating, and gets the honor of being my most highly recommended ready-to-drink tea based beverage.

You can get more information on them from Steaz.com.