Cop in East Texas stops a car full of teenagers.
He looks at the driver. “Y’all been drinkin’”
He looks at the passengers in back. “All y’all been drinkin’”
it’s definitely crept north in the last few years. Before that I never saw it offered at restaurants or worse, had to specify unsweetened when ordering iced tea.
It’s not that I insist on drinking tea “black” or “pekoed” or whatever you call without additives. I add half a packet of sugar to a tall glass of iced tea. What I do not want is the contents of the entire sugar bowl poured in there before I receive it.
Bleah.
Kool-Aid mentioned above is a good comparison: imagine if when liquid met sugar it was boiling, and it’s at least that much sugar. Ideally “another seven grains and it would be syrup” amount of sugar.
If Milo’s Sweet Tea is sold in the gallon jug where you live, THAT is the gold standard of commercially available sweet tea (the Milos red label- NOT the Splenda).
I’ve always loved sweet tea- nothing like it on a hot day- but I’ll admit I’ve had to start cutting/diluting it a bit in recent years as it’s just gotten too sweet for my taste most places.
The typical ratio is about 1 cup sugar per 2 quarts of finished tea. Some do more, some do less (I’m in this group).
Generic Iced Tea is disgusting in general, without exception.
Adding an arseton of sugar-solution is the only way it’s palatable, at all.
Well, unless you add booze.
But it’d better be a LOT of booze.
Edit to add that yes, sweet tea is made with sugar during the process, and is essentially a tea-flavored simple syrup. It’s not just sugar added to iced tea.
That’d be disgusting.
At home we sweetened our own tea so that mother could use saccarine in her tea. But when we went to Sunday School picnics, she always took a huge jar of tea that was sweetened with sugar when it was still hot. Best tea in the world.
I’m surprised that no one has mentioned the old Southern alternatives to coke, pop, and soda: co-drank and co-cola. The general term was co-drank and the specific was co-cola.
Are you messing with me? Asking for dessert first will spoil the bouquet of the meat-n-three.
I agree that extreme southern Illinois has its share of fascinating usages and interesting people. I think that Cairo is close to the Kentucky border, is it not? One of the kindest friends that I had in college was from there. Is Burnt Prairie anywhere close?
At any rate, at best, you are forty miles from a Border State. But you are more than welcome to move right on down and cross that border into Tennessee. Look at it this way though. No one is going to think you are stupid just because you are from Illinois.
Another “y’all” debate?
Y’all is plural. It is always plural. While it can sometimes be used when addressing an individual, when it is used that way it means “you and yours” or “you and the rest.” “All y’all” means every last one of you. “Y’all are gonna get a whippin’! All y’all!”
Any other use of “y’all” is just poor grammar.
(Also, I grew up in rural Georgia, and “coke” was the generic. I think that may be less true today than when I was a kid. I don’t hear that usage much if at all in Atlanta these days.)
As for sweet tea, I was raised with a fresh-brewed pot or pitcher of it available at all times. I weened myself of it as an adult, gradually reducing the sugar content of my own brew until now I drink it unsweetened. (Does this make me a traitor to my upbringing?)
One important distinction.
If you take iced tea and add sugar to it, you now have what is known as:
“Iced tea with sugar in it”
This is not sweet tea.
(Underlining mine)
Also, to see how to do a homemade approach, go to 8:10 of this episode of Good Eats
I’ve only lived in the south for 2 years, but I’ve never heard anyone use the word coke to refer to any besides coke (the specific brand), although I have heard that this occurs ‘somewhere.’
We hosted a contingent of Texas reps once here in the Pac NW. Since they had introduced us to the hideousness of sweet tea, we took them to coffee (an unheard of concept there) and introduced them to the wonderful world of custom coffee beverages.
To a one, they all ordered the nastiest oversugared concoctions possible–battle-hardened baristas were flinching in shock while taking orders. We’re talking grande-double-caramel-machiatto-cherry-chocolate-with-whip.
Southerners have a seriously screwed up palate.
I’ve heard exchanges such as Oak describes, but mostly in Mississippi and Georgia. (I haven’t spent any real time in Alabama.) In Memphis we call everything a drink.
This was my understanding of it. It’s the extreme sweetness I was wondering about in the OP.
Just as an aside - I went out to lunch today with a group of 7 people and our drink orders were:
2 Diet Cokes
3 Waters
1 Sweet Tea
1 Half and Half (1/2 sweet tea, 1/2 unsweet - not the dairy product…)
But usually, I see more people ordering half and half than sweet tea.
As another data point on the Coke issue, I spent most of my childhood in a county that’s bright red (50-80% Coke-as-generic-term) on this map, and both my parents are from dark red counties (80-100% Coke-as-generic). But I have never, ever heard anyone refer to a specific non-cola beverage as “Coke”, or say “What kind of Coke do you want?” unless they were offering a choice between regular and Diet Coke.
I have heard people refer to other colas (even Pepsi) as “Coke”, or use “Coke” instead of “soda” when saying things like “Do you have change for the Coke machine?” or “Wanna go by the 7-11 and get some Cokes?” So the brand name is sometimes used as a generic term in that part of the country, but not to the extent that a can of Sprite would be referred to as a Coke.
ETA: As for sweet tea, it sure beats trying to stir a sugar into your tall, ice-filled glass and winding up with a beverage that’s totally unsweetened until you get to the bottom where it’s sugar-sludge. Straight sweet tea is too sweet for me unless there’s plenty of ice, though. Anyplace with self-serve beverages I mix half and half sweet/unsweet, or even 25%/75%.

This was my understanding of it. It’s the extreme sweetness I was wondering about in the OP.
Yeah - my guess is that it has something to do with the heat. Spend enough time in 100 degree weather and the stuff is pretty refreshing - but I basically never drink it. Every now and then, I’ll drink 1/2 and 1/2 - mostly when I’m at a bbq and the only available beverages are tea.
Yeah, when I was a kid, sweet tea was like redneck Gatorade. You’d go out and work in the sun all day, sweating puddles, and then when you were worn down and dehydrated, some iced sweet tea would give you a nice energy boost.
Now that we’re a more sedentary society, sweet tea just seems like a really bad idea. Which is why I weaned myself off of it. (That’s weaned with an “a.” pardon the earlier typo.)
Another data point on the Coke: I grew up in Texas, and the
“do you want a coke?”
“sure!”
“okay, what kind?”
conversation was the norm.
I occasionally heard y’all used in the singular, but it caught my notice when it happened.

I’ve heard exchanges such as Oak describes, but mostly in Mississippi and Georgia. (I haven’t spent any real time in Alabama.) In Memphis we call everything a drink.
That’s pretty much what I’ve heard in Georgia most often.

ETA: As for sweet tea, it sure beats trying to stir a sugar into your tall, ice-filled glass and winding up with a beverage that’s totally unsweetened until you get to the bottom where it’s sugar-sludge.
Another memory of picnics stirs…
Many years ago (I wanna say 12, but not quite sure on the timeline), before McDonald’s all over the country introduced “Sweet Tea”, my family and I were traveling. We were ‘down south’, meaning Florida, and we went out to pick up something quick, cheap, and easy for dinner. Wound up at McDonald’s. They had “Southern-Style Sweet Tea”, and I made the mistake of ordering it.
Yuck. Having grown up in Maryland, with a diabetic mother, I was used to either unsweetened tea, or tea sweetened (after the brewing) with saccharine. I was not expecting the close-to-pancake-syrup sweetness I got with the Southern-style sweet tea! I ended up ‘cutting’ it with some Diet Sprite!
In other news, my hubby, who has no aversion to real sugar, will often order unsweetened iced tea in a restaurant, then add artificial sweetener, because it dissolves faster than ‘real’ sugar does!
I will say that as an alternative to calling everything “cokes” we sometimes used “cold drinks,” with a heavy accent on “cold” and “drink” really pronounced more like “drank.”
“If you’re going to the kitchen, get me a cold drank.”
“What kind?”
“Coke”
Also, my dad used to jokingly refer to soft drinks as “dopes” which was how they were known in an earlier age.
“If you’re going to the store, get me a Co-cola dope!”