Sweet Tea
 

I was reading an article on Sweet Tea...as Dolly Parton put it ""house wine of the South" in Steel Magnolias...

Who drinks it? I know I have never had it and probably would not like it. Back east my family (Maryland) put sugar in their tea to make it almost like Koolaid and that's not the south. I hated that stuff. From what I understand they put a LOT more sugar in the south "Sweet Tea"

Oh yeah. Sweet tea. I hate tea, but my family can easily drink a gallon a day. And it has to have LOTS of sugar.

I love iced tea, but hate hot tea..........oops, I do like hot green tea and not cold green tea...lol...When I drink iced tea, I do not want any sugar or any other sweetener in it and I am from the SOUTH!! ....Also, I do love coffee - with no sweetener or cream....Why ruin the flavor of the tea or coffee by diluting it with another substance??...Makes no sense to me!! :hypercoffee

My godbrother, Reg, makes sweet tea...not my idea of refreshing.

Don't like tea and can't even abide the smell of it!!

Y'all know what I love, but I'm on the wagon...:angelsad

Absolutely love sweet tea. The problem is it doesn't love me. The caffeine in
tea aggravates my acid reflux condition, so I have to drink it in moderation.
If it were not for this inconvenience, I would drink it much more often.
As to how sweet it should be made, this varies greatly from one restaraunt to
another and one household to another. I like mine moderately sweet, but
not overpowering. Of course it should always be over ice, never hot! Yuck!

hahaha.....then mail all your sweet tea allowance to me.I had a huge
glass of it at Panera today with my Chicken Ceasar sandwich.
I hate koolaid btw.Here you can drive through McDonalds and
get a lg sweet tea for a buck.Being its 105 out today not even
sweet tea helps.I learned to drink it from my husband.He makes
his unsweetened.Cajuns don't know what ice tea is.They drink
coffee all day long.Hot,sweet black coffee.That is the "House
wine of Cajun La." If you refuse it they think you feel you are
better than them.

Tea is a daily drink in our house. My wife and children like it sweet (although some are coming around to the truth :) ). I prefer nicely iced unsweet tea drank out of the cup (No straws for me). If I buy a Sonic Unsweet tea then I put the straw in my secret straw stash (which I keep for no reason I can recall) and I drink it straight over the ice so it is as cold as possible.

Good stuff.

My family loves sweet tea. We bring two tea bags to a boil, add one and half cups of sugar for a gallon of tea. There you have it -- sweet tea. The tea has to be iced. It drives my husband nuts when we go to Colorado, New York, etc. and can't get sweet tea. The waitress always offers a flavored tea. Sorry, it's just not the same. :-)

I prefer my green tea green to greenish brown and my black tea brown...no suger...maybe a twist of lemon in my black tea.

I love hot earl grey, strawberry cream (green), lungching dragonwell (green), hot and iced English breakfast, apricot Ceylon and some other black teas....

But like my coffee, I drink they straight, not too weak and not too strong, though I like somewhat strong coffee...it it does not make my eyes squint for more than 10 seconds then it's good :-)

But strong tea just does not taste good at all

I'm a coffee drinker myself, but I like tea with apple pie and other deserts. I prefer Chinese tea myself. I don't know as I have ever had sweet tea. I like iced tea. Speaking of sweet. I tried a cappuccino at Tim Hortons the other day. I couldn't believe how sweet it was! How does anyone drink anything that sweet?

My Pastor and his wife drink sweet tea, or as we call it in Canada "Iced Tea."

If you go into a restaurant in Canada, unless you asked for "Iced Tea" specifically, if you ask for tea, they will bring you a pot of hot water and a cup,
and a tea bag.

Iced Tea is a Southern drink for sure.

BTW I do like it on occasion.

So, iced tea and sweet tea are the same thing? If so I have had it many times and like it.

Cappuccino or a Cafe Latte? Cappuccinos usually are just coffee with frothed milk. Cafe Lattes have sugar and sometimes they put whipped cream in it. IN fact I get more of a caffeine fix from a cup of coffee than I do from cafe lattes...it's the sugar though...can make me ill sometimes

Iced Tea here is just black tea (Liptons) that is cold. Nothing in it unless it's bottled and it says it has something in it. Otherwise if you sit down at a Dennys or something and order iced tea you get cold black tea, no sugar

If you want Hot tea you say hot tea....they don't serve sweet tea here that I know of

Note: There is a difference between tea that has been sweetened and "Sweet Tea"

The truth is that it really depends on the area in which you live. I was raised in TN and if you go out and ask for iced tea mostlikely it will come sweet. I now live in Az and if you asked if the Iced Tea is sweet they look at you as if you are crazy. The truth is that Iced Tea is either sweetened with sugar making it sweet tea or it is not sweetened with sugar then it is still Iced Tea though it could be called Unsweetened Iced Tea.

Some people love tea with Lemon in it. I love my Sweet Tea with oranges in it. I will take it brewed with oranges or just added later, but I love it with orange in it. I guess that is a byproduct of being raised in Knoxville with Tennessee Vols football being the biggest thing going and the known slogan heard around town is always, Go Vols or Go BIG ORANGE. So naturally adding oranges to Sweet Tea is just a given.

I love sweet tea!

I love flavored teas, iced too! My favorite during the summer is Berry Black Cherry tea - - with crushed ice!

I don't care much for a lot of sweetened flavored black teas, but I do like flavored teas like Apricot Ceylon, Strawberry Cream..CoffeeBean and Tea Leaf Co has a pomegranate blueberry tea that is good. And non caffeine tea like Swedish berries. They have a black tea that makes great iced tea called Tropical Paradise

Oooooh, those all sound really good!

I make a gallon of sweet tea every day or two. I use three family size tea bags to a gallon, and add 1-1/2 cups of sugar. It's really sweet and really good. I can't have caffeine, so I use the caffeine free stuff at home. I do miss ordering it in restaurants though!!

By the way, I was raised in Illinois and had never had iced tea in my life until I started dating Eddie and going to his home. They didn't even ask if you liked it; they just assumed that everyone does.

Prax go to your local grocer and buy some lipton instant tea.
We drink that at home.

Everybody doesn't though..... :nah I hate the nasty stuff!!

Can someone tell me how they make sweet tea in the south? I love it when we go there. I make sun tea here, and then add sugar to it after I put it in the glass, but I'd much prefer to make the sweet tea they make.

Margie3 I need my wife to come and post it for ya.

I use one family size bag per gallon (bring a pot of it to a boil, then add water) with one cup of sugar. I have family members that add up to two cups per gallon, but that's much too sweet for me. I drink about a gallon a day by myself if I'm home all day, less if I'm at work. I've been drinking a lot this summer b/c I'm off work and working outside all day.

Margie,

I use Lipton family tea bags. Boil the water, and pour into your pitcher - I use two tea bags for a 2 gallon pitcher. Let it steep for 30 minutes, then squeeze out the tea bags and add one cup sugar or 1 1/2 if you like it real sweet. Fill the pitcher the rest the way up with cool water - - pour over ice!

Never add tea bags directly to boiling water - causes the tea to taste acidy.

Bump for Margie.....

This is pretty close to what we put in ours. Everyone can vary on how many bags or how much sugar but this is pretty close to norm, I would think.

After my first year of college, I got the chance to spend a week in London, England. Being from Mississippi, I missed my sweet tea, so I found a TGI Friday's and ordered a sweet iced tea and received a raised eyebrow in return. I said, "Look, bring me a pot of tea, a few packs of sugar, and a cup of ice." I proceeded to dump the sugar in the pot (which I'm sure was sacrilege to them), mix it up, and pour it over the ice. It was like heaven!!!! Several employees were hiding behind the bar watching me, though LOL

LOL. I'm sure you were quite the show that day!

My wife says she boils two family size tea bags into a pot of water for 10 minutes,boil on low, then take you a gallon pitcher ,put a cup of sugar in it, pour the boiling tea into the sugar, throw the tea bags out ,stir and fill the remainder of the pitcher up with water.

Thank you, everyone!!

I didn't know if you added the sugar to the water while the tea was steeping or if you waited until after you had it steeped before adding the sugar. This helps alot. I think I'm going to have to make me a pitcher of tea tomorrow. I need to drink something besides diet pop all the time, that's for sure!

Especially in hot weather. Soft drinks just don't do it. I don't like tea but I have been drinking lots of water and koolaid. I think it actually hit 106 here today. We are in a serious heatwave and it's miserable.

It was a bit cooler here today - finally!! It's been HOT.

I've been buying flavored waters. You should see my kids down those! I cannot keep up with the demand! But I am really bad with diet pops. It's a habit I've been considering working on. I'm getting closer and closer. So maybe if I start drinking the sweet tea instead. By the way, does Splenda work as well as sugar? Has anyone tried that?

Yeah, alot of folks down here do Splenda and Sweet-n-Low. My hubby drinks unsweet and uses the artificial sweeteners because he's diabetic and won't drink sugared drinks. My kids put sweeteners in sweet tea to make them even sweeter!

I think the taste of Splenda is pretty close (much better than SweetnLow, etc!) but not quite as satisfying, if you know what I mean. I used it for quite a while and dropped a few pounds b/c of not consuming so much sugar.

Tupperware used to make a great little tea bag squeezer. I think I got it as a party favor one time, and I absolutely have used it weekly at least, for the past 25 years. I don't know if they still make them, but it's worth checking out.

By the way, Margie, I put the 3 family size bags in a small pyrex pot of water and bring it to a rolling boil and immediately turn it off and let it steep in the pot. Meanwhile, I heat 2 cups of water in a glass measuring cup in the microwave for 3 minutes. I pour that over 1 & 1/2 cups of sugar in a gallon pitcher and stir it up real well before I ever add the tea to it. The sugar is really easy to dissolve that way. After a few minutes I squeeze the tea bags and pour the concentrated tea mixture into the sugar water. Stir and then add ice and water to fill up the pitcher. Voila!

Oh, and I only use Lipton or Luzanne (sp.). I won't use store brands or Nestea. I HATE NESTEA!!!

sounds complicated!!!:sos

My grandma drank iced tea alllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll the time!! She would only use Luzianne and occasionally Lipton. But she agreed with you - never Nestea.

She never made hers sweet tea tho.

When I was a kid, my mom wouldn't let me have iced tea because of the caffeine. But Grandma would. She would put about 1/4 glass of tea, fill it to the 3/4 line with milk and add sugar and ice. That's the only way she allowed me to drink tea. And she got away with it with my mom because I refused to drink straight milk. So Grandma would tell her that at least she was getting some milk into me. I did like the tea that way.

The other thing I remember is that Grandma always drank her tea with a lemon wedge squeezed in it. AFter she would squeeze the lemon wedge, we kids would fight over who got it. Then we'd eat the pulp and whatever juice was left.


Well, folks this has been fun. Thanks for teaching me a new trick. But now I have to :bedtime I'm reading a good book and I want to read a little before I fall asleep.

Have fun!!

Eeewww - - taste completely different when you do that. I use to work for Lipton and they taught me not to boil the tea bags because it causes the acid in the tea to take over the flavor of the tea.

We were at a family event and I was telling them this and they didn't believe it would taste different, so we did it both ways and taste tested it and couldn't believe the difference.

I've always heard to turn the burner off as soon as it starts to boil, but I do put the tea bags in from the very first. Maybe I shouldn't. Hmmm....