experiment goal: to determine whether smarties are an effective tea sweetener
hypothesis: smarties will sweeten the tea, but also introduce unwelcome flavor profiles due to their flavoring
procedure: procured one cup (≈12 fl oz) of Barry’s Tea Gold Blend black tea, hot. added 2/3 of a single roll of smarties candy (10 candies). wait for candies to dissolve, then stir well. tea will be sampled after stirring concludes.
addendum: control group was used. control sample consisted of one cup of the same type of tea, sweetened with white sugar. results will depend on the relative tastes of the control and smarties tea
results: smarties tea was significantly more bitter and less sweet than sugar tea. additionally, the smarties failed to dissolve in the expected manner, and when stirred, ended up breaking down into particulates that refused to dissolve.
conclusions: because of the chemical/structural makeup of smarties, they do not function well as an ad hoc tea sweetener because of their reluctance to break down. it may be the case that crushed smarties would work better, but this experiment was intended to study how normal, uncrushed smarties would work as a sweetener
