Brew Up

Summertime and the sipping—cool iced tea on your favorite porch rocker—is easy. But which tea is best, if you aren’t going to go to the trouble of making a pitcher on your own? We asked Chef Jeffrey Kohn, who sells approximately 130 gallons of house-brewed iced tea weekly at his barbecue eatery, Q Restaurant & Bar (112 Main St, Port Chester 914-933-7427; qrestaurantandbar.com), to taste-test 10 iced teas to help us find the best. Here’s what his taste buds told him.

Honest Tea ($1.59/16.9 fl oz) “Very good tea flavor with a hint of lemon. I can see sediment at the bottom; real tea was used to brew this. ”	Gold Peak Tea ($1.09/18.5 fl oz) “Authentic tea flavor. Contender for the best in this bunch.”	Lipton Pureleaf Iced Tea ($0.99/16 fl oz) “I can taste the tea. Not overly sweet. Right amount of acidity.”	Snapple ($0.99/16 fl oz) “Despite being cloyingly sweet, the taste is still decent.”	Nature’s Promise Organic Black Tea ($1.19/16 fl oz) “Not much tea flavor. Not sweet at all.”
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Inko’s ($1.49/16 fl oz) “No complexity and not enough tea flavor. Average-tasting.”	Tazo (13.8 fl oz) “Not bad-tasting, but I don’t taste tea but orange and other citrus flavors.”	Joe Tea ($1.69/20 fl oz) “Tastes commercial, like it was made with a powder. Overly sweet and the color is too dark. ”	Arizona ($1.49/42 fl oz) “Like brown sugar water. Lots of citric acid. Puckery and terrible all around.”	Brisk ($1.19/20 fl oz) “Absolute worst. Too tart from too much acidity. Artificial and pedestrian. Tastes like it came out of a vending machine.”