Tea: Nature's Soft Drink

Growing up in a town with very bad tap water, I developed a (very expensive) aversion to anything that comes straight out of a faucet. Now, while this can generally be remedied with a slice of lime, orange or cucumber, let's face it: most of us drink shit that is ludicrously sweet.

And expensive.

And unhealthy.

An 8 oz "serving" of Coca-Cola (and most other sodas) has 100 calories. But no one drinks just 8 oz of soda at a sitting. One can is 12 oz and a standard plastic bottle is 20 oz.

And while I'm not one to count calories, it's still empty ones.

Juice is not much better. Many juices have more sugar (and more calories) than soda, although they often (not always) have vitamins to make up for it. Sports drinks and "designer" flavored waters generally fall into this category as well-- Glaceau's VitaminWater has approxomately 150 calories per bottle.

The only true "water" I've found in my sampling of designer waters has been the delicious and unsweet Hint. But Hint costs about $2 for a small 20oz bottle. Great for a treat, but not for every day, that's for sure!

And you may notice that I'm not mentioning diet drinks. This is because I firmly believe aspartame is a tool of the devil. Come on, guys, seriously. You don't want that in your bloodstream.

There's a way around this, and it's cheap, yummy, and requires minimal clean-up. And you probably have it in your house already.

It's called tea.

Long a staple of the Southern set, most of us above the Mason-Dixon don't brew our own iced tea or expect it set out on restaurant tables. But I've got to give a hand to them, sweet tea is just about the cheapest thing you can drink next to tap water, and you can sweeten it to your own taste, which means that if you don't like sweet drinks, you can just have...un-sweet tea. Even if you sweeten it, you don't need half as much sugar as is in your soda.

How do you brew your own iced tea? If you really need me to tell you, well...I generally boil a pot of water, put it in a dishwasher-safe plastic pitcher with a lid (it won't melt!), add sugar immediately (I use about 1/3 cup of sugar for one big pitcher) and then plop in three tea bags. Then it goes right in the fridge. In a few hours, I have myself a great big pitcher of tea.

You can use pretty much ANY tea you want-- and this is the great part. I generally use green jasmine or peppermint herbal. You can make your iced tea with caffeinated or decaf teas. You can even mix up the teabags to get the exact flavor you want, or add in some mint, lemon, or other herbs. You can sweeten it with brown sugar, honey, or corn syrup if you prefer it to white sugar. Or with an alternative sweetener like Splenda that isn't as gross as aspartame.

But is tea really as cheap as soda?

Let's look. I just went to my grocery store, where I bought two boxes of tea: Stash Peppermint at $2.65/20 bags and Twinings Four Red Fruits Black at $2.99/20 bags. Since I use three bags per pitcher in a pitcher that is approximately 2 liters, I am getting 12 liters of iced tea (6x3=18 tea bags) for $3 at the most. So $3/12= $0.25/liter. A 2-liter bottle of Coke at the same grocery costs $1.99 regular price, so that's $0.99/liter. Even if I splurge and get some super-fancy $6/20 bags tea, that's still $0.50/liter. So iced tea-- even iced tea made with top-shelf gourmet brand teas-- is way cheaper than soda. And phenomenally healthier for you.

If you're really on a budget, many tea brands sell boxes of 100 tea bags for between $2.99 and $5.99, making the price $0.09-$0.18 plus the incidental cost of whatever you use to sweeten it and a 2 liter pitcher, which will cost you about $5.