To quote the great painter Salvador Dalí: “The difference between false memories and true ones is the same as for jewels: It is always the false ones that look the most real, the most brilliant.” I remember nothing about the sociopolitical climate of the summer of 1997, but I remember exactly what I consumed on a daily basis in vivid detail. Between bouts of skateboarding, pick-up baseball, and hours-long multiplayer games of Magic: the Gathering, I quenched my soul with the music of Third Eye Blind, and I quenched my thirst with Lipton Brisk Raspberry Iced Tea. I probably drank 2 liters of the stuff every day. Inspired by a recent trip down memory lane when “Jumper” played on my local “modern” rock station, I sought out a can and was immediately appalled by how sugary and fake it tasted, which had me wondering which other memories from that summer were false.
Third Eye Blind is still a no-skips masterpiece, and I’m happy to report that AriZona’s offering is a supremely crushable, future-proof replacement that hits just like my memory of Lipton’s. The raspberry flavor is gentle, and it commingles perfectly with the black tea base. If a time machine could take me back to that hot Walgreens parking lot where I loitered so often in those halcyon days of the late ’90s, I would hand my 12-year-old self a can of this, along with a recommendation to buy that Black Lotus he’d been eyeing at the card shop before its price shot up to the moon.
Score: 7.8
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