How I Sweeten Iced Green Tea

Sweeten Iced Green Tea
Sweeten Iced Green Tea

You would not think that the question of how to sweeten iced tea would take a whole post to answer. The truth is there are many ways to sweeten your tea. You could add sugar, artificial sweetener or natural sweeteners like honey.

The purpose of this post is to tell you how I sweeten my iced green tea because i think I have found a easy, calorie reduced and economical way to do it.

The most difficult thing about sweetening iced tea is that it is cold. Whatever you put in it does not dissolve easily without sometimes herculean effort. A spoonful of sugar can take minutes of stirring before it is dissolved.

What I do is make a jar of simple syrup and add a spoonful to my glass of iced tea.

What is simple syrup? It is a fancy word for sugar water. To make simple syrup, you take one cup of sugar and one cup of water, heat the water to a boil and dissolve the sugar in the water. Let it cool and now you have simple syrup.

A spoonful of this mixes immediately with any cold drink it is added to. Ironically, I saw a bottle of this for sale at my local Giant food store this past week. It was 4 or 5 dollars for a sixteen ounce bottle. You can make many times that amount with one bag of sugar and some tap water.

One tablespoon of simple syrup is enough to sweeten 16 ounces of green tea to a pretty good level of sweetness. Of course if you are used to drinking southern sweet tea you might need more.

One tablespoon of traditionally made simple syrup has around 20-25 calories. This is not a lot of calories to pay for a perfectly sweetened glass of iced green tea, but it is too much for me. There are other options if you want to reduce or avoid the calories all together.

You could always use an artificial sweetener like Splenda, but some people don’t like the taste and I don’t like the chemicals.

Here is my recipe for a reduced calories natural simple syrup:

One half (1/2) cup Truvia Baking Blend Natural Sweetener
One cup of water
Boil the water and dissolve the Truvia Baking Blend

The secret here is the first ingredient. Truvia Baking Blend is a mix of Truvia natural sweetener and sugar. It has 75% less calories than regular sugar and acts like regular sugar when using it in cooking.

Now a tablespoon of my simple syrup in my iced tea costs me only about 5-8 calories and I don’t have to worry about dissolving the sugar before I drink it.

This is truly a great way to sweeten your iced tea and as an aside, simple syrup is great in other things like Mojitos or Old Fashioned cocktails, but that is for another post on a different blog.
tea iced
How I Sweeten Iced Green Tea How I Sweeten Iced Green Tea Reviewed by bajamos on July 02, 2018 Rating: 5
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