la.foodblogging

OK, I know that I pledged my allegiance to morning coffee earlier this week, but it’s warm out and I wanted to start my day with an iced tea so I stopped at Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf.

I consider myself somewhat of an iced tea connoisseur, starting back to the days of my youth when we had sun tea jugs on the back porch and my sister and I would have iced tea drinking contests at Sizzler, giving us caffine induced jitters and hyperactivity.

I must have had a good cup of iced tea at Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf at least once in my life, because I keep going back. In the last few years, though, every cup I have had from there has the same stale/plastic aftertaste. I used to think that I just got an old batch of tea, but it isn’t a spoiled tea taste, I know that one. Then I thought it might be that the brewing equipment wasn’t cleaned well enough and was imparting a little extra flavor.

I have it figured out now, it’s a plastic taste. Going back to my youth again, I recognize the tea contamination to be remarkably similar to what hose water tasted like. Yes, I drank from the hose, and more than that, I liked the rubber hose water taste, to me it tasted like summer. When I’m paying $2 for an iced tea though, I don’t want to taste summer, I want to taste tea and tea only.

If you’re familiar with Coffee Bean’s tea serving and storage method, it’s not out of stainless steel holding tanks like they store their coffee in. They keep the tea in small refrigerators stored in plastic/rubber pitchers. So I ask the CB&TL barristas, please clean those pitchers, or better yet, CB&TL managers, get some non leaching storage methods so I don’t think of hose water when I drink your tea.

By Jonah (see more of his posts). Jonah is the founder of la.foodblogging and also created Digesty, a food blog aggregator and Cheww.com, a spam free foodblog search engine.