When my first partner and I started looking at what we wanted to include in our loose leaf tea concept back in early 2004, one of the options was bottling a tea beverage I had developed. We visited two reputable bottling companies in our area and hired a food chemist to help us. He had wonderful credentials and was extremely knowledgeable.
One of the things he did was to send us home with a number of preservatives to taste for ourselves. Bottling required something as natural and neutral as possible in taste and we settled on malic acid over citric acid or some of the other choices. Malic acid comes from fruits such as apples and, since this was to be more than just simple brewed tea in a bottle, the malic acid seemed to work best with the recipe.
However, the more we tasted the preserved beverage as compared to the original, freshly made version, we just couldn't bring ourselves to have it bottled. By bottled standards, it was 'really good'. But we couldn't get past two things: The lack of 'life' in the taste after a preservative was added and the problem of the lack of antioxidant value.
Bottled tea is convenient, but it just can't match freshly brewed tea shaken with ice, both for taste and healthy antioxidants. Once you taste the 'real thing' you will find, like us, that bottled tea just doesn't taste the same. Even bottled teas that make claims of how natural they are don't tell you that they are preserved in some way for shelf life and most have at least some sweetener in the mixture.
