Any Southerner worth their salt knows how to spot good iced tea from a mile away, and even if you aren’t a Southerner, you’ve probably developed your preferences for the tangy beverage. Usually, homemade tea is the best, but there are plenty of decent store-bought brands out there, too. We recently ranked nine store-bought brands of iced tea from worst to best, and in a competition between Pure Leaf versus AriZona brand teas, the winner is pretty clear.
We ranked Pure Leaf sweet tea as eons ahead of AriZona tea when it came to both taste and balance in flavor. For the purpose of the test, we stuck with plain sweet teas, which was where the Pure Leaf brand really shone. The drink was sweet but not overwhelmingly so, with a surprising lack of a bitter aftertaste. The tea had a slight acidity, but in a way that worked in Pure Leaf’s flavor because it cut through the sweetness quite nicely. We appreciated that this tea was readily available at gas stations and grocery stores alike, making it easily accessible. We’d go so far as to say it’s almost everything you could want from a store-bought sweet tea.
Pure Leaf sweet tea takes the gold
Pure Leaf’s tea bottles are simplistic, and so are its ingredients, which work in the tea’s favor. The brand ethically sources its tea leaves from countries like Indonesia and Sri Lanka, among others, and only from estates that fall under the Rainforest Alliance certification. Pure Leaf emphasizes the great care that goes into selecting particular kinds of leaves for tea blends, from Indonesian green tea leaves to Kenyan black tea leaves, all of which ensure a superior flavor. Beyond sweet tea, the brand makes a handful of flavored teas and launched its first-ever zero-sugar sweet tea just last year.
AriZona teas may be cheaper, notorious for the 99-cent iced tea cans, but we found that it simply had a distinct lack of freshness and flavor to it, something we ranked the Pure Leaf sweet tea highly on. The AriZona tea was also missing the tang of classic black tea that was prevalent in other store-bought brands, failing to cut through the cloying sweetness. You can find AriZona teas in over a dozen different flavors, but the contrast between it and Pure Leaf sweet tea is fairly stark and would lead us to reach for a Pure Leaf bottle for a road trip instead.
