Marburger Farm Dairy Mountainberry Tea Cooler

About a decade ago Mike, a couple of other friends and myself would go to this crappy bar for "Metal Night." We weren't/aren't super into metal but our friends DJed it and it was something to do. Every week we went and every week about an hour or so in we would get bored and go get pizza and iced tea. Not any iced tea mind you but Fikes tea. It was a really cheap jug of tea that was actually really tasty. We would just kind of disappear from the bar every week and not tell anyone. When people would ask we would jokingly reply that we had a meeting of "Team Cool." That's really a pretty boring story, but it was fun times. The reason I tell you is that I believe Marburger Farms and Fikes to be the same company. The only places I ever found Fikes was in one gas station in Buffalo and one in Zelienople, PA (A terrifying town that is home to the Mercer Family). I'm sure you'll hear all about them at some point. The reason I think they are the same is that I would always stop at that gas station on my way to Pittsburgh to pick some up. When I went a couple of days ago Fikes was nowhere to be found but Marburger Farms was there in the same style bottles, with the same flavors. I don't know if there was a hostile takeover and to be honest I don't care. What I do care about is that this iced tea still exists.

There are a lot of "ghetto" iced teas out there. Most of them aren't fit to feed to swine. This tea is cheap and should be terrible, but it somehow turned out great. It's definitely more sugar water than tea, but it still has a somewhat tea flavor. They use instant tea powder instead of brewing it, which is normally a big no-no in my book, but again they somehow make it work. I think it helps that they actually use fruit juice in their flavoring instead of some weird chemicals. In case you were wondering "mountainberry" is Pennsylvanian for blackberry.