The Sweet Tea We Ranked Dead Last Has More Ingredients Than Pepsi

Sweet tea is one of those drinks that should possibly come with an "if you know, you know" descriptor. You can buy sweet tea anywhere, especially in the South, and it's a mainstay on many fast food menus. But, believe us, not all sweet teas are created equal. And that's exactly what we discovered when we tasted and ranked seven different bottled, store-bought sweet tea brands.

Sadly, at the bottom of the list was one of the famous tea brands on the market — Lipton. Reminder, we're not talking about sweet tea bags you can make at home. This is all about the pre-brewed, sweetened, and bottled or jugged tea you'll find at stores. In the case of Lipton, this famous brand just offers a very mediocre bottled sweet tea. It really doesn't even taste like tea because the whole flavor profile is just sweet.

One look at the ingredients in the Lipton Sweet Tea explains it all. Most brands contain tea, water, sugar, and maybe one or two preservatives. The Lipton brand has more ingredients than a can of Pepsi — and that's not a joke. It contains three different preservatives, citrus pectin, natural flavoring, and Stevia Leaf Extract. The artificial sweetener doesn't help the cause here, and this Lipton Sweet Tea just comes across as totally artificial in general.

If you're wondering if it's just us — how can anyone dislike Lipton sweet tea? — that's not entirely the case. One Reddit thread has opinions that are all over the place. "Tastes great when you're running on low sleep and just want something easy and warm," a user in r/tea wrote. "It's not good quality and I don't go out of my way to buy it." Another Redditor wrote, "You know, tea is that kind of thing, where even the lowest quality stuff can be quite satisfying." We'll grant that, to some extent. One Redditor compared Lipton to Budweiser beer: "It's bad, but people drink it all the time and enjoy it."

On the bright side of the bottled sweet tea universe, our favorite was none other than Milo's. This sweet tea originated at the Milo's burger chain that currently has 24 locations exclusively in Alabama. But its famous sweet tea is sold at grocery stores across the country, including at 2,500 Walmart locations. It tastes exactly how sweet tea should taste. For what it's worth, Kroger also makes a solid gallon of sweet tea.

You've got a lot of choices in the world of tea — whether it's hot tea, green tea, unsweet tea, and the classic Southern sweet tea. If you're a connoisseur of this classic iced sweet tea, we'd advise you to take a hard pass on Lipton's bottled sweet tea. To sum it up, it's disappointing that such a large brand makes such an artificially tasting tea that tastes like nothing but fake sugar.