Why Sweet Tea Is the South's Quintessential Drink

Bicker all you want about its regional varities, or where to draw a geographical line—no drink represents Southern culture like sweet tea.

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In 2006, McDonald's ventured where no national fast-food chain based outside of the South had dared to tread: it put its own version of sweet tea on the menus of its restaurants inside the South. Encouraged by the regional sales of its "Mickey D's Sweet Tea,” the franchise started selling the brew in Yankee territory all across the country. Around the same time, several Southern-based chains—Chick-fil-A (Atlanta, GA), Cracker Barrel (Lebanon, TN), Jim 'n' Nick's Community Bar-B-Q (Birmingham, AL), and McAlister's Deli (Oxford, MS)—followed suit, capitalizing on the growing, national thirst for sweet tea. The groundswell of interest was epitomized by McAlister's now seven-year-old "Free Tea Day," an event hosted every July where the chain gives away an estimated 350,000 free cups of sweet tea. Yet even with all of that sweet tea sloshing around nationwide, I wonder if people outside of the South really understand that sweet tea is not just another sugary drink on a value menu; sweet tea is integral to the South's cuisine, culture, and soul.

Before deciding if what McDonald's has wrought is a cause for celebration or concern, it helps to understand what sweet tea is. Traditionally, sweet tea is made by pre-sweetening the tea leaves (an orange pekoe blend is preferred) and water mixture while it is still hot.  Sweet tea purists argue that any deviation from this process in terms of adding sugar or ice produces "sweetened tea," not sweet tea.  However, contemporary sweet-tea recipes are less rigid, so as long as the final product tastes sufficiently sweet. There's no hard-and-fast rule about adding lemon, but it is usually served on the side; and if you're making sweet tea at home, Luzianne brand tea is the choice southerners prefer.

Besides mastering the mechanics of making sweet tea, one should be mindful that sweet tea carries a certain aesthetic. Michael Twitty, author of the forthcoming book The Cooking Gene, grew up making sweet tea every day for dinner under the tutelage of his Alabama-born grandmother. The tea flavor should be strong, and the tea's color should be a "reddish, brown glow," he says. Any sweet tea with a darker color might as well be called coffee, and any tea with a lighter color is probably just sugar water. Twitty concludes that, unfortunately, most of the sweet tea served outside of the South fails to strike the proper balance, and veers towards either extreme.

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