Smart and Simple Tagless Tea Bags (Dollar General)

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Some people are coffee people. Other people are tea people.

My wife and I are tea people.

My wife loves teas of all types, especially ones with a dash of fruity flavor. She’ll also do herbal teas from time to time and is known to embellish her teas with a bit of honey.

I like black tea, primarily. English breakfast, Scottish breakfast, and Earl Grey are favorites, but I’ll take a generic black tea, too. I’m also known to change things up with the occasional cinnamon tea or winter wake up blend.

I get much of my tea from Aldi, and what I can’t get there I’ll pick up at a regional grocer. I’m always on the lookout for other options, though, so when I was recently in Dollar General, I decided to take it up on its black tea.

Smart and Simple Tagless Tea Bags are a Dollar General exclusive. They’re distributed by Dollar General’s Dolgencorp and are a product of the United States. At the time of this post, a 100-count box of the tea bags cost $2, which comes out to about 2 cents per tea bag. That’s on par with the cost of basic black tea at Aldi and Walmart.

The bags are not individually wrapped in plastic or foil envelopes. They’re just sitting unwrapped inside the box. They come in perforated pairs, which you’ll want to separate depending on how many of them you need.

According to the ingredients, this is made with orange pekoe and cut black tea. Like all regular black tea, it has no calories and no real nutritional value.

The box does come with some brewing instructions, which you may or may not need depending on your tea experience. To make hot tea, bring fresh cold water to a boil and pour over a single tea bag in your cup. Then, let your tea brew for 3-5 minutes, according to your desired strength. Finally, remove the tea bag and serve with sugar, lemon, or milk, if desired. (Remember, you can put your used tea bags in your compost bin.)

To make iced tea, use 3-5 bags for each quart of boiling water (3 for mild flavor, 5 for full flavor). Brew for 5 minutes, remove tea bags, sweeten if desired, and pour over ice.

The bags are tagless, so unless you want to pluck it out with your fingers you’ll want a spoon handy to get the bag out. The advantage to tagless tea bags is that they create a little less waste.

Our testers thought this tea — we served it hot — was adequate enough. I found it to have maybe a little more of an aftertaste than I was used to, while my wife thought it was about the same as other black teas. Both of us thought it was okay, though.

The Verdict:

Dollar General’s Smart and Simple Tagless Tea Bags are a competitively cheap option for black tea. The bags are easy to use and make tea that seems to be in the range of other black tea options we’ve had.