Bottled Sweet Tea Tastes Unforgettable When You Add This Fresh Fruit To The Mix

Bottled sweet tea is already halfway to a good summer drink, especially if you add a splash of vanilla extract, but straight from the bottle it can sometimes taste a little one-note. Watermelon is an easy way to change that. Its mellow sweetness works well with tea's slightly bitter, astringent edge, making the drink taste fruitier without completely covering up the tea underneath. And adding watermelon to tea isn't some random kitchen experiment. In "Ed Mitchell's Barbeque," a cookbook from the famous North Carolina pitmaster, watermelon puree is mixed into sweet tea as a natural sweetener. Bobby Flay has a version, too, made with black tea, strained watermelon puree, and fresh mint.

You don't need to make tea from scratch to try the idea — the bottled stuff is prime for this fruity upgrade. Similar to how you'd make a watermelon shandy, start with seedless watermelon, blend it until smooth, and pour it through a fine-mesh strainer so you're getting all the juice rather than a glass full of pulp. Then stir a little into chilled, bottled sweet tea and taste it before adding more. Both the fruit and the tea can vary quite a bit in sweetness, so there's no magic ratio to follow. The goal is for the watermelon to be obvious without turning the drink into watermelon juice with a little tea hiding somewhere in the background.

If the bottled tea you started with is especially sweet, adding a little lime juice is an easy next step. A squeeze adds tartness and gives the drink a sharper, brighter edge. Fresh mint, the star of a refreshing mojito (which you can also add watermelon to), takes it in a cooler, more herbal direction. Both already show up in watermelon drinks for good reason, and you don't need much of either. Ed Mitchell's watermelon sweet tea includes lime juice as well as mint, while Bobby Flay's version leans more heavily on mint alongside the fruit and black tea.

Watermelon doesn't have to be the only fruit involved, either. Strawberries are a natural fit with iced tea, and peaches, raspberries, blackberries, cherries, cantaloupe, and honeydew can work, too. Martha Stewart's strawberry iced tea recipe specifically suggests those fruits as variations, along with lime or orange in place of lemon, plus herbs like mint or basil. If you want to experiment, I'd still stick to the same rule as with the watermelon: Add a little fruit juice at a time and taste before pouring in more. After all, you're trying to make bottled sweet tea more flavorful, not turn it into fruit punch.