I’m standing in my kitchen making another pitcher of iced tea, and I’m using Lipton. Yellow box. Tea bags. The whole deal. And I’m not even a little bit ashamed.

This is weird because I am, objectively, a tea snob.

For hot tea, I have opinions. I have a favorite tea house. I have a specific green tea that I will evangelize about to anyone who makes the mistake of asking. I have loose leaf tins lined up like little soldiers of sophistication. I care about water temperature. (Sort of. We’ll get to that.)

But iced tea? Lipton. Every time. And I cannot explain this cognitive dissonance except to say that I contain multitudes, and some of those multitudes are hypocrites.

The Origin Story Nobody Asked For

My tea journey started when I was working in hospice, many moons ago. The job was exactly as heavy as you’d expect—beautiful and brutal in equal measure—and I needed somewhere to exist between patient visits that wasn’t my car or a depressing fast food parking lot.

Enter Happy Lucky’s Tea House in Fort Collins.

I started working out of there. Brought my laptop, did my charting, took my phone calls. And slowly, surrounded by hundreds of varieties of loose leaf tea and people who cared about this stuff, I started to get it. Tea wasn’t just a beverage. It was a ritual. A pause. A tiny pocket of peace in a job that was fundamentally about being present for people in their hardest moments.

The Tea That Changed Everything

There was another Dylan who worked at Happy Lucky’s. (Great name. Excellent choice, his parents.) One day he handed me a cup of China Monkey King green tea and said something like “try this.”

Reader, I tried it.

And look, I don’t want to be dramatic, but it rewired something in my brain. This wasn’t the bitter, astringent green tea of my past. This was smooth and sweet and slightly nutty and I immediately needed to know everything about it.

China Monkey King is still my favorite. I buy it by the pound. I have backup pounds. If Happy Lucky’s ever closes, I will need to be sedated.

I Am a Tea Heathen (In the Best Way)

Here’s where I lose the purists: I am a chronic re-brewer.

The same leaves? Second steep. Third steep. Fourth steep. I will extract every molecule of flavor from those leaves until they’re basically composting in my infuser. The tea people say the second steep is often the best anyway, so really I’m just… being thorough.

I also try to follow the temperature guides. Green tea wants cooler water, black tea wants it hot, that kind of thing. But “try” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Sometimes the kettle is already boiling and I’m impatient and we all just have to live with my choices.

This is why I call myself a snob and not an expert. Snobs have opinions. Experts have discipline. I have opinions and a fundamental inability to wait for water to cool down.

The Lipton Exception

So why Lipton for iced tea?

I genuinely don’t know. It’s what my family used. It’s what tastes like summer to me. There’s something about that specific, uncomplicated, vaguely tannic flavor that just works when it’s cold and there’s ice involved.

Could I make iced tea with fancy loose leaf? Sure. Have I tried it? A few times. Did it taste better? Probably, technically, yes. Did it taste like iced tea? Not to me.

Sometimes the cheap version is the right version. That’s not a betrayal of my tea snob values. That’s… okay, it’s definitely a betrayal of my tea snob values. But I’ve made peace with it.

Go Get Some Good Tea

If you’re in Fort Collins, go to Happy Lucky’s. Tell them the guy who used to do hospice charting in the corner sent you. (They will not remember me. That’s fine. Go anyway.)

If you’re not in Fort Collins, find your local tea house. The weird one with too many tins and someone behind the counter who will talk your ear off about oolong. Let them recommend something. Try it. Maybe it’ll become your Monkey King.

And if someone catches you making Lipton iced tea afterward? Just tell them you contain multitudes.

Stay caffeinated, friends.