Lipton is best-known for its flagship product, their basic black tea, available in teabags in nearly every mainstream supermarket in the U.S. However, Lipton also sells green tea, including both pure green and flavored teas, blended with other ingredients including lemon, orange, and other fruit flavorings.
On this page I will review Lipton’s green teas, comparing them against other competing products both in terms of flavor, price and value, and alleged health benefits.
Flavor, Value, and Quality: How does Lipton green tea compare to other teas?
Lipton’s pure green tea is not the best example of its type out there, not even in mainstream supermarkets. In fact, my personal opinion is that it represents one of the company’s weaknesses, and that Lipton does a better job of quality control for their black teas. This makes sense, given that Lipton has a history as a UK company, where the tradition of black teas is very strong, and green and white teas are only a relatively new discovery.
All that said, I would strongly recommend Lipton’s teabags over the bottled (ready-to-drink) Lipton products. Brewing your own tea is a little work, but the result is going to be fresher, healthier, and (once you figure out how to brew it to your liking) better tasting as well. Take care to brew Lipton green tea, like other green teas, with water that has cooled from boiling; boiling water can produce an overly bitter cup.
How to locate better-quality teas:
My opinion on this matter is that it is almost never worth buying packaged green teabags in a supermarket. I think this is true of both the pure and flavored teas. These products lack both freshness and quality–most of them, including Lipton, consist of paper teabags filled with finely broken pieces of relatively low-quality leaves. When I drink green tea, I drink loose-leaf tea, and I seek out named varieties, from named regions of production, sold by companies which know more about green, white, and oolong tea.
However, if you are purchasing green tea in a supermarket, I prefer brands like Yamamotoyama (a Japanese company), Ten Ren (if available, a Taiwanese company), or Foojoy (specializing in Chinese teas). These brands and companies all offer superior quality and value in their green, white, and oolong teas.
On health benefits:
The topic of the health benefits of tea is one that I have researched a great deal, in the course of my work as editor of RateTea. There is relatively strong evidence supporting modest benefits associated with tea drinking, in terms of reducing the risk of heart disease. But it is also true that tea, particularly green and white tea, has been heavily over-hyped by the industries of dietary supplements, attempting to sell green and white tea supplements, or low-quality teas at jacked up prices.
While it is true that green tea contains a small amount of vitamin C, and black tea generally does not, there is no evidence that any one type (green, white, oolong, or others) is universally any healthier than black tea or other types.
In summary:
I am personally not a huge fan of Lipton’s green tea; I prefer the company’s black tea, such as denti-e-sorrisi, which is the product that I think the company focuses on when it comes to flavor and quality control. But I do think their teabags are preferable to drinking their bottled teas. All tea is healthy, but there is not a lot of evidence that green tea is healthier than black, so I recommend making your choice of what to drink on the basis of taste, price, and quality rather than supposed health benefits–you’ll get more benefits with better-tasting tea anyway, as it is fresher.
