My girlfriend is absolutely obsessed with this bottled tea, Green Diet Iced Tea Citrus. Personally I think it's kind of gross, but I don't really like tea to begin with. That's personal taste for you.
I purchased a huge amount of the stuff for her to drink while she was visiting, and it's only during the aftermath that I realized just how much unnecessary plastic I was having to deal with. I tried looking around, but Lipton doesn't sell a powdered version (which would produce far less waste) of the Diet product and probably be cheaper to boot.
I'm a pretty stubborn person though, so I figured I'd take my own swing at it. How hard could it be, right?
They have the ingredients for their Citrus Green Iced Tea Powder Mix listed on their website (the non-diet version, anyway) which consists rather simply of:
- Cane Sugar
- Citric Acid
- Green Tea Powder
- "Natural Flavor"
- Soy Lecithin
Okay, easy enough. I also know that the Diet version uses Aspartame instead of Cane Sugar. A closer inspection of the Ingredients label on the Diet indicates it has some Ascorbic acid, too.
So I went out and bought some Equal, Green Tea Powder, Ascorbic Acid, and Citric Acid. Added on some Lime and Lemon juice for those "natural flavors", whatever that means.
I left out the Soy Lecithin because my research indicated it was an anti-clumping measure, which I don't think I'd need with separate ingredients?
I'm not sure how to feel about the ingredients I've assembled, nor do I really have much of a clue on what ratios to use here. I want the prep for this to be a surprise so I can do a blind taste test with my girlfriend, but the drink tastes awful to me to begin with, so I don't know if I'm the best judge of similarity between the two. I'm willing to just bang it out through repeated attempts, but maybe somebody here would know a good starting point for how much of each ingredient to mix in?
Thanks!