His brand not panel’s cup of tea

LITTLE ROCK — Rush may know radio, but what Mr. Limbaugh knows about sweet tea wouldn’t fill one of the caps off a bottle of that beverage he is hawking.

He calls his newly launched brand Two If By Tea, and in his typically self-denigrating fashion - “The verdict is in ... This tea is the best iced tea you have ever tasted.” - Mr.

Limbaugh was begging for a challenge.

So I have challenged him - although he doesn’t know it yet - and the verdict on Mr. Limbaugh’s tea is in.

June, by the way, was National Iced Tea Month, and the challenge wasn’t only about Two If By Tea.

I already had intended to pull together a taste-testing to see whether anyone mass-produces and bottles sweet tea that actually tastes like tea; or whether one bottled tea tastes more like tea than another.

So on Tuesday, right here in River City, a panel of nine sweet-tea drinkers gathered in the newsroom for a blind taste-testing of mass-produced tea, including Mr. Limbaugh’s.

The good news, the judges found, is that some store-bought teas taste better than others. I served up 10 different teas, eight of which I purchased at grocery stores. The judges, whose ages ranged from 17 years to somewhere north of 40, assembled around a table in the newsroom conference room.

I didn’t disclose the brands of teas in the ice chests. They drank each sample with no idea of its origin.

The judges were Bennie Fuller, the nice woman whose voice you hear if you call the newspaper’s switchboard; Chad Day, a dashing young reporter from Missouri; Christie Graves, part of our human resources team, famous for her cakes; Frank Lockwood, who oversees religion and federal political coverage;

Jason Haley, who oversees the upkeep of our grand old building; John Sykes, who takes pictures and writes funny stories about his adventures; Lamor Williams, a dashing young reporter from Pine Bluff;

Michael Hoge, the dashing 17-year-old son of my boss; and Vicki Morgan, pre-press manager, whose department is the last to handle each page of the newspaper before it goes to the press.

And this is the order in which they preferred the teas, which they rated on a scale of one to five: Wal-Mart’s house brand and Gold Peak tied; Kroger’s house brand; Milo’s;

Arizona; Tradewinds;

Lipton’s; Red Diamond.

As for Rush Limbaugh: No one on the panel knew I had included his tea; further, most of the panelists were unaware even that Mr. Limbaugh had launched his own brand, which is why I am confident that Rush’s score was well-earned and nonpartisan.

Of a possible rating of 45, seven tasters scored him zero, one gave him a 1, but another gave him a minus-1.

Thus his tea scored a big fat zero, which we hope will convince him to leave the sweet tea to the professionals, like me: The judges gave my anonymous entry a 36 out of 45, the winner by six. Score one for homemade.