None. Tea is a bitter drink, dammit.
Just a little - part of a packet, or a fractional spoonful
A moderate amount - a sugar packet, or spoonful
A lot, anything more than the moderate amount.
Iced Tea: How sweet do you like it?
I was just looking at Sociological Images, and one of their posts today is this breakdown of the ingredients in a Snapple Iced Tea.
Frankly, getting excited about it seems odd to me, since it seems to me that most sweetened teas are obviously very heavy on sugar, or fructose. But I'd wondered whether there were people who would be surprised to see that much HFCS in their iced tea - and how much sweetener they'd put in their own iced tea.
Yummy, bitter, cold tea.
You forgot the "None because I don't drink Iced Tea" option
Last edited by pepperlandgirl; 09 Apr 2010 at 01:00 PM.
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Am I drinking tea or am I drinking sweet tea?
Zero. "Sweet Tea," in the Southern tradition, is the bane of my existence down here. It's weak fucking tea with a ton of sugar, and unless you remember to specify "unsweet" when you ask for iced tea, many Texas restaurants will deliver to your table a hummingbird feeder with a straw in it.
I can't stand any bottled sweetened teas either; Snapple, Lipton, Arizona. All nasty. Sugary drinks in general give me heartburn, and I hate the syrupy mouthfeel of HFCS-sweetened soft drinks.
In restaurants, if I'm not drinking alcohol, my default drink is unsweetened iced tea, and I leave it unsweetened.
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What sort of abomination is iced tea!?!
So I did. But you can tell us here, can't you?Originally posted by pepperlandgirl
You forgot the "None because I don't drink Iced Tea" option
Zuul, I don't understand the question: Is there something in your experience that's iced tea as well as sweet tea? I'd always taken sweet tea to be a cognate for iced, sweetened tea, vice hot tea.
The awesomest way to get cold caffeine shot into your system on a hot day.
Suuuuure, sit there on your balmy emerald isle and pass judgment on us. It's hot as fuck down here, man! :Shake:
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If you venture anywhere in the South, Iced Tea and Sweet Tea are totally different things.
When I make mine at home I add probably between 1-2 cups for roughly 10 cups of tea? Maybe?
Now I need to make some and determine what my tea:sugar ratio is.
Seriously, can someone explain to me, in short, uncomplicated sentence, just what the difference between sweet tea and iced tea might be?
As it is I'm even more confuzzled than usual.
"Sweet Tea," capital S capital T, is a Southern USA concoction where sugar or simple syrup is added while the tea is still hot, then the whole thing is chilled.
It differs from sweetened iced tea (i.e. where you take plain iced tea and stir a couple spoonfuls of sugar in) in that the heat allows you to supersaturate the Sweet Tea with sugar.
Seriously, it is hummingbird food. It's weak tea with three times as much sugar as you would ever think to stir into a glass of iced tea - often as much as two cups of white sugar per gallon of tea.
Last edited by OneCentStamp; 09 Apr 2010 at 01:19 PM.
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I'm going to hide here with my nice, unsweetened, tea, and try to forget about that....
A common recipe is 1 1/2 cups of sugar in a gallon of tea. That's twelve teaspoons' worth per 16 oz. glass. :diabetic, rotting-tooth smiley:
I'm going to hide here with my nice, unsweetened, tea, and try to forget about that....
"You laugh at me because I'm different; I laugh at you because I'm on nitrous."
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My point is that tea is tea and sweet tea is something else entirely and no self-respecting tea should try to mimic it. Basically, I don't like it sweet. Sorry for being so confusing there.
Now I'm wondering if you could seed sweet tea with, say, a sugar cube, and have the excess sugar precipitate out of solution.
Many southern cooks make theirs with not sugar but simple syrup, to which a splash of corn syrup has been added, to prevent just that. And store-bought sweet teas are typically all HFCS anyway, so no danger there.
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Sweet Tea is gross, the cans and bottles of pre-sweetened tea are disgusting. However I do add a half to a whole pack of sweetener to my glass if unsweetened Ice Tea. Just enough to reduce the bitter. One Sweet & Low is good for 32 ounces I find.
Snapple Diet Raspberry is a little sweeter than I like but still quite drinkable.
This is all disappointing, really. If I'm being presented with hummingbird food, I want to have the pleasure of seeing crystals growing in the solution.
Zero sweet and none more black.
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That's the stuff.
"I won't kill for money, and I won't marry for it. Other than that, I'm open to just about anything."
-Jim Rockford
Very refreshing.
"I won't kill for money, and I won't marry for it. Other than that, I'm open to just about anything."
-Jim Rockford
No great surprise here, but this is pretty much what I would have said.
When I was a kid my mom used to make two things of sun tea every day in the summer and pop them in the fridge, we didn't drink a lot of pop or Kool Aid or anything, just cheap as shit sun tea. Never added anything to it either, tea is delicious all by itself. No sugar, no lemon, no nothing. Just cool, cool iced tea.
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Oh man, Cluricaun. My mom did the same thing when I was a kid. I desperately crave some now.
I like unsweetened iced tea. But if I want it sweet, one sugar packet isn't going to cut it. I prefer to sweeten my own tea, which makes me a bizarre alien by some standards. People say that sugar won't dissolve in cold tea. I say they aren't trying hard enough.
I bought a sun tea jug last year at Target, but it was made out of plastic and made the tea taste like cancer so I chucked it. We have a giant glass jug with a spigot now that was intended for sangria or margaritias, neither of which we ever make in amounts that would require a giant glass jar really, at least not all at once, so I purloined it and used it to make tea. The taste was there, but it didn't fit in the fridge. Still, I had sun tea. The best is when it's made with cold water and it mixes in the sun and you drink it right out of the jug so you get that mix of warm sun temperature and cold water temperature swirled together all at the same time. Yeah.
Though I've heard it said there's a food poisioning risk with sun tea.
Hell, if I didn't do things just because they made me feel a bit ridiculous, I wouldn't have much of a social life. - Santo Rugger.
We are serious caffeine hounds here. Every night I set up the coffeemaker for the morning and brew a pitcher of iced tea for the fridge.
5 tea bags to two quarts boiling water, with about a half-cup sugar and a few tablespoons of lemon juice. We have a glass pitcher for sun tea in the summer, but this gets us through the cold weather.
I put so much sugar in my tea that I usually don't bother, I just get a Coke instead. Probably 4-5 packets of sugar.
Of course, if I can get proper Sweet Tea, that's the way to go. It's a different thing entirely.
No sweet.
I like my tea bitter. Like my soul.
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Obviously some people have beem making sweet tea wrong. It's supposed to extra strong to make up for the sweetness and no sweeter than any other sweet drink.
Bring 1pt. cold water to a boil remove from heat
add 7 Lipton Iced Tea bags to hot water
let sit for 5-7 min. remove bags
pour over 1cup sugar in a gallon jar stir until sugar disvolves
let sit additional 5 min. fill jar 3/4 full with cold water stir top off with ice
enjoy
Last edited by Glazer; 10 Apr 2010 at 04:01 PM.
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I go thru tea like mad... often a gallon in a day and a half. When I make a gallon, I put just under a 1/2 cup of Splenda in it, so it's sweet, but not overly sweet.
I drink MAYBE 2-3 soft drinks in a month's time, a couple beers, loads of water... but I gotta have my tea!
Very lightly sweetened. This brand does the trick for me (they use agave nectar):
Also, Turkey Hill has a diet mango that's pretty good.
Lipton! Don't they have Luzianne in your neck of the woods?
Iced tea should have lots of sugar. Even some sitting at the bottom won't bother me a bit.
Hey, long time no see Nzinga, Seated. Hope to see more of you.
Nice to see you again, Nzinga. You're wonderful even if your tea is nasty.
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What OneCentStamp said, only substitute "Indonesia" for the American South.
To make sure none of the sugary "goodness" precipitates out, Indonesians boil sugar and water together to create sugar syrup. They then fill an iced-tea glass about 1/3 full of the syrup, top it up with tea, and serve it to you. The syrup stays at the bottom until you stir it, so if you unthinkingly take a big swig through a straw and suck up what's at the bottom of the glass, you get a huge mouthful of sugar syrup.
I am so about to make some iced tea right now. If I can find where my new roommate keeps the sugar.
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