We live in a world where everything is extra-sweet. Everyone’s getting fat on sodas drenched with high fructose corn syrup. That’s stuff’s bad for you. If you try to cut out some of that extra sugar from your diet, you get stuck with synthetic, fake-nasty substitutes that make things like low-fat cookies, saccharin yogurt and aspartame chewing gum taste like a lab coat washed in anthrax. Sugar saturation is horrible, but put anything tasting like Sweet and Low in front of me and I’ll hurl. I don’t know if <a href="http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1931116,00.html" target="_blank">artificial sweeteners cause cancer</a>, but they sure taste like something entirely synthetic and gross.

I know sugar’s not that great for you, but I look at any and all alternate sweeteners with extreme skepticism. So when I received some samples of Honest Tea to try, I wasn’t sure what to make of the whole “sweetened with organic Stevia” thing. But hey, I thought, if it’s not an artificial sweetener, how bad could it be?

So I tried some of the tea flavors. And you know what, they’re kinda good.

If you try drinking flavored iced tea of any kind, you’ll typically encounter two different reactions. The first is blandness, the second is super-sweetness. The Honest Tea flavors I tasted were neither of these things. The flavors I tried were actually quite mellow.

The Half Tea and Half Lemonade tasted like the title on the bottle. It wasn’t some industrial syrupy Arnold Palmer concoction. The Honey Green Tea wasn’t overly sweet, just sweet enough. Same deal with the Mango Green Tea and Passion Fruit Green Tea. I half-expected those flavors to taste like Jolly Rancher juice, but that’s not how they went down. I don’t know what Stevia is, but if it gives drinks some subtle sweetness without the sugars or the synthetics, I’m all for it. If you’re over all the sugary overload, try this stuff out.