This 3-Ingredient Drink Is the Most Refreshing Thing We’ve Tried All Summer
It’s a great way to add complexity to a sweet soda.
If you spend any amount of time on social media watching people cook, taste new foods, or mix up drinks, you’ll see that trends come and go. Some trends stick around because they’re just smart, like the upside-down puff pastry tarts—the simplest way to customize a tart with sweet or savory ingredients. Other trends, like last year’s communal butter boards, are novel at first but short-lived.
Drinks can trend, too. Of course, we’re heading into PSL season when pumpkin spice finds its way into hot and cold beverages everywhere. This summer we heard a lot from Water Tok, that part of TikTok that fancies up still and sparkling water. One of the season’s biggest water trends was jam water, adding flavored seltzer to a bit of jam left in the jar, and mixing the two to create an extra-fruity seltzer. Even everyone’s favorite summer cocktail, the Aperol spritz, saw some competition when the Hugo spritz started trending.
Now, there’s a Sprite concoction that’s showing up everywhere online, and it sounds like it could be either really great or really awful, with no in-between. Of course, we had to give it a try.
Sprite Lemon Tea
Sprite is already a sweet drink—we all know that. It’s a sugary lemon-lime soda that’s super refreshing when cold. But it can also be a little over the top in the sweet department.
We don’t know who first decided to add a couple of tea bags to a bottle of Sprite and let it sit for a bit, but we have a feeling they were thinking of the flavor combination in an Arnold Palmer, half iced tea and half lemonade. Whether they were thinking of the Arnold Palmer or just seeing what would happen, we’re glad they did.
When TikTok’s Hisham Rouse posted his version of this drink in July, it received over 15 million views. He mentioned in the comments that “Sprite tea” goes back to Myspace and Friendster days. It seems it’s been popular for over 20 years, but suddenly it’s trending.
How to Make Sprite Lemon Tea
Here’s all you need to re-create this refreshing drink:
Push two regular black tea bags down into a 20-ounce bottle of Sprite.
Put the cap back on and allow the tea bags to cold steep in the Sprite for 1 hour.
Pour the Sprite-tea mixture into an 8-ounce glass filled with ice.
Add a squeeze of fresh lemon juice and stir.
The bitter tannins in the tea bags counterbalance the sugar in the Sprite, bringing some complexity. The lemon juice adds some acidity. The end result is something unexpectedly better than the sum of its parts.
For a 2-liter bottle of Sprite, just add 6 or 7 tea bags. Just remember that the longer you leave the tea bags in, the stronger the tea flavor will be. You can take all the tea bags out after an hour and drink the bottle over a few days, or you can leave the tea bags in and see how you like the stronger tea flavor as it develops.
To Spike or Not to Spike?
The Arnold Palmer is not just a non-alcoholic drink. It’s also a cocktail that adds vodka or bourbon to the mix. So it made sense to see if Sprite lemon tea works as a lower ABV cocktail by adding just 1 ounce of alcohol to the 8-ounce drink.
No surprise—it worked. Bourbon adds an additional depth of flavor to the drink, and you don’t need to use an expensive bourbon for it to be enjoyable (the combined flavors are reminiscent of this bourbon slush). The addition of vodka brought the booze, but it didn’t change the flavor of the drink much.
Sprite lemon tea is refreshing on its own, and it’s also good with a bit of booze. The next thing we’re going to try? Switching up the lemon for lime.
