Oolong is a variety of tea, not a brand. It’s somewhere in between green and black: Aged longer than green, but not as long as black.
Re-using a tea bag is only marginally better than re-using coffee grounds to make a “fresh” pot.
Depends on the tea. I often find that green teas and herbal teas can be okay for a second steep, but rarely if ever for black teas.
The difference is that reusing coffee grounds will result in coffee that will be aggressively bitter and sour, because all the good flavors were extracted the first time and only the awful flavors remain. Tea is safer, because it usually doesn’t have “awful” flavors. At worst, you wind up with tea that’s weaker or one-note. The exception is black tea, because you’ll get a cup full of tannins.
I never order tea in a US restaurant.
I only order coffee in a US restaurant to accompany a huge breakfast of omelette, sausages, hash browns, buttered toast, and tomato juice with lemon. I expect the coffee to be swill, and only sip it intermittently between sips of tomato juice and ice water.
Yeah, I remember the first time I ordered iced tea and was asked “Sweet or Unsweet?”
me: “WTF is ‘unsweet’? I guess that means unsweetened? Since when do they serve sweetened tea anyway? Always thought that’s why there are sugar packets at the table.”
Personally, I think Southern-style sweet tea is abominable. It’s like a tea-flavored syrup. They literally super-saturate the hot tea with sugar when they make it.
OTOH, very little is more refreshing on a hot day than a big glass of slightly dilute unsweetened iced tea. (have to put that ‘unsweetened’ on there these days, because of our degenerate cousins to the east).
“The South” has little to do with the southern most points of the United States. It’s more of a colloquialism that generally means the southeastern US, and probably more accurately refers to the southern states during the civil war.
When I lived in Texas ordering “tea” in most restaurants would get you iced tea.
Where I live (Georgia) ordering “tea” will generate a followup question: “Sweet or unsweet?”
When I’ve gone north and asked for tea it was assumed I meant hot tea.
And, FWIW, Texas is a sort of Southern and Western hybrid, with the various parts of the state tending more or less in each direction. For example, East Texas is more classically “Southern” than say… West Texas, which is more ‘Western’. South Texas is likely most influenced by Mexico, Central Texas is kind of where it all meets, and North Texas is similar, but is infested by people fleeing Oklahoma.
Yeah, Americans as a whole don’t understand hot tea.
Unless you’re at an actual tea shop, the hot water will be just coffee-holding temperature from the Bunn-O-Matic coffee brewer’s spigot, so it’s never even been near boiling. And, 90-ish percent of the time, you’re just going to get Lipton or worse. Fancier places will have Twinings or Tazo.
As for why restaurants tend to charge for more tea, my WAG is that teabags are countable inventory, but coffee is just an amorphous cost of business like the energy to make ice or the bulk salt used to fill salt shakers.
All I know is that society suffers since the loss of Trans World Airlines. We no longer have stewardesses asking if we would like some of their TWA tea.
There probably is no restaurant policy regarding refills. I’ll bet it’s your server’s call as to whether or not he wants to bring you another tea bag without ringing it in. When you order hot tea in the first place, your server HATES YOU.
Behind the scenes, servers are the laziest group of people on earth. Out on the floor, they’ll show some hustle, but back of the house they’ll do absolutely anything to avoid work. If they bring you coffee, it’s grab a mug and a couple of creamers and the coffee pot and hit the road. If they’re serving hot tea, it’s grab a mug and a saucer and a tea bag and a creamer and a lemon and a honey, then go looking for the little teapots that nobody stocked the night before and fill that up and then hit the road.
It’s the same with customers ordering hot chocolate, BTW. Instant hate.
Wikipedia says Paula Deen was born and raised in a city only halfway closer to my hometown than Houston, and I have never liked or willingly chosen chicken fried steak as a meal option but even I know that cream gravy is the standard. He may have lost, but unless it was specifically stated otherwise, it would not have been because he used white instead of brown.