We go through at least a gallon of tea here every day between the four of us. Sweetened with about three-fourths of a cup of sugar. Made with Lipton family size bags, steeped for about thirty minutes.
My daughter likes mixing in a bit of fruit juice for flavor; the rest of us take it with a full glass of ice. There’s no better drink in the world to me!
Where in the U.S. can you not get iced tea? I am a tea drinker and I travel the country extensively, and I have never once not been able to get it. Not once.
Outside of the south the default is unsweetened, and it is often weak, but it is always available. I always forget to ask for unsweetened tea when I am in the south, and I usually gag when I drink it. In some places it is more like tea-flavored syrup. I can’t stand that stuff.
I keep tea in the summer, but there is a foot of snow on the ground, it just isn’t the same.
Tea isn’t even any good until it has aged a couple of days. 'Round these parts, “tastes like just-made tea” means “bitter”.
There are occassional vegan restaurants (like Atlanta’s Lush Life Cafe last night) I’ve been where deliberately brewed iced tea is not on the menu. They had sorrel (excellent), and ginger beer (homemade), and I was offered hot green tea with ice cubes (feh!) – it ain’t the same.
At least theirs was properly brewed. Unsweetened weak tea is ass. Might as well be rusty water.
Until I read this thread, it never even occurred to me that unused tea goes bad after a few days. Unused tea rarely lasts beyond than an evening in my family. In my family it goes in the fridge, or if the fridge is full on the counter until it’s gone. I guess some people’s palates are more discerning than ours when it comes to something fresh brewed.
Yeah, if you boil the hell out of pekoe bags, sure that stuff is nasty. But sun brewed tea that sits around for a few hours is damn good deliciousness.
It has never occured to me that people may throw tea away after a meal and I refuse to believe your allegations. No one is that crazy.
Lou, if you are used to syrupy tea, just switch to a sugar substitute like Splenda and start off at full strength and just add less and less sweetener with every batch until you’ve weaned yourself. Being born and raised in Tennessee, I grew up on tea you could stand a spoon up in and used that method to the point where I only use a quarter cup for every gallon and only that much because I need something to counteract the lemon, an integral component of any tea (as a Southerner, “ice(d)” is superfluous. It is always cold pekoe unless specifically called something else) I drink.
I can handle sour or bitter but not bitter and sour so some kind of sweetener is necessary for me.
And DrMemory was spot-on in his suggestion of sun-tea. I’m not sure how well that would work now that I’m living in the land of constant cloud cover but my family used to brew it not-uncommonly while I was growing up and it is just as tasty, if not moreso, than anything you’ll get out of a kettle or coffee maker.
I just came back from Big Lots, where I bought a box of 100 green tea bags for $3. I’m going to start making iced green tea on a regular basis now!
Lipton’s got a cold brew that, for just being regular tea, is very good, and doesn’t require anything but cold water and a pitcher.
Moreso tasty. I always stirred in the sugar, then added the tea bags, while it sat out in the sun. That made the sugar just, like, chemically bond with the tea leaves of something. (Drool.)
DAMN. As cold as it is in Atlanta today, I want some sweet tea now.
Have you naked savages never heard of the American Tea Association??? Advice below from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention:
"What can we do to minimize the risk? The CDC makes the following recommendations:
The tea industry recommends that iced tea be brewed at 195 F for 3-5 minutes, that tea be stored for no longer than 8 hours, and that the tea brewer, storage dispenser, and faucet be cleaned daily. These guidelines for the preparation and storage of iced tea are consistent with available data and are likely to reduce the coliform contamination of iced tea.
Redesigning tea dispensers to be more easily dismantled and cleaned than those currently used could further reduce the risk of bacterial contamination of iced tea.
The practice of making “sun tea” by steeping the bags in a container of water in the sun may be a higher risk than brewing tea at high temperatures because it provides an environment where bacteria are more likely to survive and multiply."
What exactly is “bad” about tea that has gone bad? Does it sour? Go rancid? get moldy? Smell bad? Taste bitter? What?
I don’t usually drink tea, but I think if I did, and I stored it in the fridge, it might be a month before I felt like having some. What, to your mind, would be wrong with what I was drinking?
Yeah, but that’s all good for commercial food preparation in the food industry. Seems like overkill in your own kitchen.
Still, I don’t worry about bacteria in my own sun brewed tea anymore than I worry about e. coli in my own raw cookie batter.
pseudotriton ruber ruber. I haven’t ever had iced tea that’s gone bad. This is a completely foreign concept to me.
Faucet? I think they’re talking about a restaurant that stores at room temp in a tea dispenser. House tea is stored in a pitcher in the fridge. If tea in Mama’s fridge had bacteria, then it must have been the good kind. Why, I’ve drunk refrigerated aged ice tea for fifty years.
My iced tea recipe: Fill a 2 quart container with cold water. Put in 8 store-brand (Pathmark) regular tea bags. Leave it for an hour or so. Voila!
In other words, I find that sun tea doesn’t require a sunny spot. It just makes itself. Those Lipton cold brew bags do work very well, but I find that the store brand tea bags work almost as well, and are way way cheaper.
I’m no Southerner, but I’d never throw out undrunk iced tea. Why would you do that?
And for those of you who have never tasted iced tea gone bad–consider yourself lucky. Ew. It just has this nasty moldy taste. I’ve only ever tasted it in tea made in those big unrefrigerated metal restaurant containers. If they don’t make it fresh every day, the taste develops. And once the mold is in there, it’s really hard to get out. I have no qualms about sending tea back if it has that taste.
Metal check of things to avoid.
MMM Yeah we always keep our tea.
Usually there isn’t enough left to keep though! 
BTW I live in Arkansas and I like my tea sweet
I have been many places in the United States where you can’t get iced tea. For some reason California seems to think that iced tea is made “instantly” by mixing some sort of powder with water. They can call that crap tea if they want, but I refuse!!
I don’t get it. Real iced tea is so easy to make.
I haven’t had instant tea in a restaurant (even in CA) since about 1988.
We keep tea, but it usually goes bad before we drink it, because we’re lazy.
I, too, have never had tea that was kept in the fridge go bad. Every time I have had tea that has turned, it has been in a restaurant, where they tend not to keep it in a fridge. I think that is the key to my OP–my friend never puts her tea in the fridge. It is brewed before the meal, served warm over ice, and then the remains are tossed. It doesn’t make sense to keep it if you aren’t going to keep it cold, because it will turn.
From the replies in this thread, it looks like her way is dying out, and probably has been for a while. That doesn’t surprise me, as her parents were raised in small towns in the 1930s and 1940s.
My first paragraph leads to another question–why the heck don’t restaurants refridgerate tea?
Back when I had had many roommates, and a small fridge I would make ice tea concentrate and leave it for two weeks or so.