Sweet tea is prepared by boiling water, adding tea leaves, and then pouring the resultant concentrate into a pitcher with sugar in it. Once the sugar is fully dissolved, ice and cold water are added to the proper dilution.
When I was a kid, sweet tea wasn’t common in restaurants, even though I lived in Texas. We made it at home every single day, though. We got cokes (what kind? Dr. Pepper) at restaurants. Heck, I remember one Mexican restaurant that served instant tea (now that’s an abomination).
I despise canned/bottled sweet tea. For one thing, they don’t use sugar, but HFCS, and for another, they always put citric acid in it, which gives it a lemony tang. I can’t stand lemon in my tea.
Some restaurants seem to make a passable sweet tea, but yeah, they go overboard on the sugar. I generally get half sweet/half unsweet in those places.
As for explaining it, either you like it or you don’t. My grandmother hated sweet tea, and she was as southern as they come.
But “a little sweetener” is not “sweet tea.” That’s just sweetened tea. “Sweet tea” is a specific Southern type of tea drink that is made with a supersaturated sugar solution. I think it’s absolutely revolting, but I didn’t grow up with the drink.
I may have ordered that way because I was more used to just getting permission to have a soda. Picture the same exchange with my grandmother:
Me: “Can I have a coke, please?”
Grandmother: “Sure! What kind do you want?”
Me: “A Sprite, please.”
Also, while I clearly remember the incident in question, the details are somewhat blurred, to be honest, more than 30 years later. It was an outside food stand run by the Army PX. It’s possible that I might have also asked the guy, “Do you have any coke?,” then been disconcerted to be handed a Coca-Cola instead of being asked what kind of coke I wanted.
To me, sweet tea is tea that is prepared as I described above, with hot tea concentrate dissolving the sugar. Sweetened tea is unsweetened tea that you add sugar or some other sweetener to. They really don’t taste the same.
And I never noticed any kind of standard for how much sugar one used to make sweet tea - in our house, we’d make a half gallon, and put in about 2/3 of the tupperware scoopy thing Mom had in the sugar canister. Not sure how much that was. But obviously, it’s less than most restaurant-sold sweet tea, as I find most of those to be too sweet.
However, I do like my iced tea sweeter than my hot tea.
This isn’t false, it’s just totally misleading. People who call “sweetened iced tea” “sweet tea” are a much smaller subset (and most likely ignorant of) the “actual” sweet tea folks.
And I would be hardpressed to be convinced that the former came before the latter.
No, regular brewed tea with added sweetener is not the same as “sweet tea” any more than mashed up french fries are the same as “mashed potatoes” or lima beans baked in a casserole are the same as “baked beans.” On some technical level they might be, but to argue the point when someone is trying to get information or opinions specifically about mashed potatoes or lima beans, when it is already established that those terms have specific meanings would be most unhelpful, full stop or none.
We may be talking past each other, here. Sweet tea just means tea with sugar in it. There is much debate about how much sugar. Sweet tea most definitely does not mean tea with artificial sweetener.
Uh…I don’t really wish to argue, but it’s pretty obvious that there isn’t really an overarching single vocabulary in some kind of rigidly-defined “South,” but I certainly have heard “y’all” used frequently to refer to singular persons. I grew up in “extreme” southern Illinois (described that way because Chicago people tend to think that Champaign is “southern Illinois,” but I’m talking about 40 minutes from Kentucky). That area had/has a fascinating type of dialect…generally “Southern” in accent (though not nearly as “strong” or “twangy” as Kentucky), and a real mix of word usage.
Anyway – “y’all” was frequently used in the singular, “yins” (whatever that was supposed to be short for, usage: “yins guys goin’ ta the show tonight?”) always was plural.
OK. Here in the North, usually when we order iced tea, we get it black and sweeten it at the table. So let’s say I get may tea and mix in three or four packets of sugar. Would you call the resultant concoction “sweet tea”? I, personally, would not.
I have a notion that the extremely sweet tea that’s being derided here had its origin, at least in part, as a counter to dilution. Bluntly, it’s hotter down here. It takes more ice to chill drinks, and it melts faster. Where I grew up, we made iced tea very strong (none of this holding it up and looking through it crap–it looked like coffee until you added ice) and very sweet. Then you added ice, which began to melt immediately, diluting it. The result wasn’t so overpowering.
Of course, that approach became habit, and we eventually wound up doing it even when the air wasn’t scorching hot. Now we like it that way. It makes a good contrast with extremely salty foods (which many of us also have an unhealthy partiality to), and goes well with breads.
Note: This is nigh-pure speculation on my part. Maybe we just like overpoweringly sweet stuff.
That map may explain why I never noticed the (frankly weird) soft drink = Coke thing in my youth. My home parish is one of only two dark blue “pop” spots it shows in the deep South.
I don’t know of anyone who does this, but I do know several families who brew their tea, leave it unsweetened, and keep a container full of simple syrup on hand so that the siblings don’t fight over how sweet Mom needs to make the tea. At the end of the day, it’s all about how easy it is to dissolve the sugar, and sugar just doesn’t dissolve well in cold liquid.
Here we are, refighting the Civil War all over again.
My husband was raised in Kentucky to Louisiana-born and raised parents and drinks tea sweet unless extreme circumstances force him to gag it down unsweetened. You do not have to boil sugar in the water; he and many many other sweet tea drinkers I know add it at the table. Here in Kentucky you’re usually asked (“Sweet?”) rather than actually having sweetened tea brought to you as the default in restaurants.
I live in Kentucky and have never lived anywhere else; I drink my tea unsweet with lemon. And, though I don’t myself do it (much), I’ve heard y’all used as a singular word.
