On Sweet Tea

While I am no sweet tea expert, I do love me some sweet tea. I recently became a fan of sweet tea on Facebook and even opined that there should be a sweet tea delivery service. Apparently that day I was too lazy to drive thru the McDonald's.

Following these observations, a friend in Germany who was unfamiliar with sweet tea posed several sweet tea-related questions such as do you use a specialty tea? do you add milk? I am not wise in all of the ways of the sweet tea but did my best to answer below.

Sweet tea is like iced tea but sweetened with copious amounts of sugar or simple syrup added during the brewing process while the tea is hot so all sugar becomes liquid and there's no grains of sugar left. I make extra strong sweet tea and then dilute it with ice/water. Sweet tea is always served iced and can include lemon, or to be really fancy, mint garnishes but I am lazy and don't have those.

Almost every restaurant in the south has sweet tea. I was at a Lebanese restaurant yesterday and ordered sweet tea (very good by the way). Most places in the north don't have sweet tea. It was once suggested to me in a Freeport restaurant that I could make sweet tea by adding sugar but that's not right. I don't know what the exact dividing line is. Maybe the Mason-Dixon but I've never tested this theory. (Anyone up for a roadtrip to see? Does southern Pennsylvania have sweet tea? I doubt it.)

I use regular ol' Lipton tea bags for my sweet tea but any plain tea will do. I do not use Earl Grey or other specialty tea. Under no circumstances does one add milk to sweet tea. Some fancy places will have raspberry sweet tea or peach sweet tea. I view this as an abomination. Sometimes restaurants will serve half sweet tea/half lemonade drinks. These are OK in my book.

So there you have it. I left out sun tea/sweet tea because I thought that might confuse the issue. If you feel that I have erred in my explanation, you can leave comments.

I am content with the thought that if I can help to export sweet tea to Germany and other exotic locales, perhaps my time upon this earth will not have been wasted.