Unsweetened tea AKA “brown and water”.
I love my sweet tea. I grew up in Missouri, which is Southern in parts. My great aunt always served sweet tea, so sweet it was thick. I adored the stuff.
I can get pretty good sweet tea at Arby’s and Jason’s Deli (semi-regional chain).
Being a beekeeper in addition to a tea drinker, let me tell you it is very easy to put a whole 5 lb. bag of sugar into 10 cups of water (winter bee food recipe) when the water is heated and this concoction doesn’t start crystalizing out too fast.
-rainy
and then you add the whiskey or bourbon? 
No, no, no. You drink the bourbon straight (see tea/grits exam above).
You’re safe in the harem as long as you amuse me. And it is selective. It’s made up of only men.
I have an aunt that makes sweet tea by boiling water, adding what appears to be a dozen tea bags and Og only knows how much sugar, bringing it back to a boil and allowing it to cool. The stuff is tea syrup. She dilutes that with water. It’s a diabetic coma in a glass of ice. I never understood the bringing it back to boil thing but maybe it does further dissolve/break down the sugar.
Oh, and as Mr. Blue Sky said, it’s Luzianne and only Luzianne. All else is heresy.
Makes notation that NinjaChick is officially added to “To Be Burned” list.
I adore sweet tea, got hooked on it when I lived in Alabama as a pre-teen.
The only place to get it here in Ohio is Waffle House (which I believe uses instant tea…ugh), or make it at home.
Thanks be to God that my wife learned how to properly brew a good sweet tea to satisfy my southern longings.
“Sweet tea” was what I grew up on in SoCal. My parents are not from the south, but from SE Illinois, which is getting close. IIRC, you bring water to a boil, and pour it over about 6 tea bags (for 1/2 gallon) and let steep. Remove tea bags, squeezing them to remove all the steeped tea. Add about 1/2 to 2/3 cup sugar and stir to dissolve. Add water to make 1/2 gallon. Serve over ice.
It goes cloudy if you refrigerate it overnight, but is still good.
Unfortunately, I grew up on Lipton, but have since progressed to other, superior teas. My current favorite for iced tea is Twining’s English Breakfast. But I can’t use sugar any more. 
Boiling Water can dissolve an infinite amount of sugar. The more sugar you add to water, the higher the temperature rises until you eventually reach the melting point of sugar.
The simplest solution to the sweet tea dilemma is to make a super-saturated simple syrup. Just boil some water and add twice as much sugar and stir until dissolved. Put in a bottle and let cool to room temperature, some sugar should precipitate out. Then, just make normal, unsweetened iced tea a bit stronger than you would make normal sweeted iced tea and add your simple syrup until the right sweetness is achieved. This way, everyone can have their tea sweetened as much as they want without excessive stirring.
The saturated syrup will last indefinately at room temperature, bugs can’t grow in it.
I don’t know where in Ohio you are, but I can tell you just about all the places within half an hour of Dayton that serve sweet tea. Many are chains that you ought to have in your area.
The easiest to find around here are Skyline Chili and Cracker Barrel.
This is what one of my favorite restaurants does. When you order tea it comes unsweetened with a little syrup pitcher of sugar syrup. Everyone gets exactly the level of sweetness they love. Everyone is happy.
I’m from Texas, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen sweet tea at a restaurant. Around here it’s regular iced tea and sugar on the side. It’s not hard to get enough sugar to dissolve to suit my tastes, I’d freak out if they brought me tea that was already sweet. I will add that I normally have a soft drink with my meal, but I’ve ordered tea enough times that surely I would have come across “sweet tea” by now. I’ll be doing some “field research” in Memphis next week, but I imagine beer will be the drink then. I’ll ask some of the locals about sweet tea and see if they look at me like I have 3 eyes…
Hope the slight tangent is ok. I forgot about Cracker Barrel, I have had their sweet tea. I refuse to eat at Skyline, so that is out for me. Any others?
That ain’t sweet tea country then. Otherwise, they’d have served you sweet tea when you asked for tea–and if you’d objected, they would have said “why didn’t you ask for unsweetened tea?”
To pick at nits, it would have been “unsweet tea.” 
It’s likely that the mass-produced stuff served in restaurants is made with high-fructose corn syrup rather than with table sugar.
Well being diabetic, I only drink non-sweetened iced tea with some kind of sugar substitute in it.
Maybe it’s different than sugar, but I’ve never had any trouble getting it to dissolve.
And grits are nasty things.
I’m not sure if I could live in the south. Love the weather, hate the cooking. Except of course in N’awlins.
Odin, artificial sweeteners dissolve much more readily in cold liquids than actual sugar does. Much. Infinitely, really.
If it’s not strong enough to take the paint off a car door and sweet enough to crystallize your tonsils, it ain’t sweet tea.
As for the high-fructose corn syrup, Cracker Barrel doesn’t use the stuff in its tea. You take a clean pitcher and dip it in the sugar bin, then add enough hot water to dissolve it. Stir well, then add to the tea tank. Ain’t too bad for restaurant tea.
Nobody here has mentioned the pre-sweetened tea they serve at restaurants in Canada. It’s not sweet tea, it’s just nasty.
Is it really that hard for some people to get sweet tea out of the south? I’ve lived in the northeast all my life, and I can get it at restaurants. Granted, it’s just the “Lipton Sweetened Iced Tea” that comes out of the fountain, not nearly as good as real southern sweet tea I’m sure, but in a pinch, it will do, won’t it? Some places only have unsweetened, but I’ve been to enough that have sweetened to know that it’s fairly common. I imagine that even the fake sweet tea I drink is closer to the real stuff then ordering the unsweetened kind and adding sugar, for reasons already mentioned.