Me seeing this for the 14th time in my 5 years on tumblr and seeing more notes and comments but still reblogging it since it’s literally a World Heritage Post
NOW LOOK ME IN THE EYES AND TELL ME WHAT KIND OF TEA IT IS.
(The following may not apply outside the Southeastern United States, aka “The South”.)
“Sweet tea” is specifically Orange Pekoe* tea with a minimum of “enough sugar to give a British person apoplexy”. Sometimes the Orange Pekoe is mixed with other black teas and/or an additional flavor such as Peach or Raspberry. Some lemon is allowed, but if you add too much it becomes Lemonade Tea**. “Sweet tea” is usually iced, but sometimes just chilled, and can be bought in cans or jugs***.
* known in (at least) The South as “tea.” If you asked most drinkers if they liked “Orange Pekoe Tea”, they would not know what was meant, and many might go so far as to ask “Is that like Lipton or Luzianne?” Just… say “yes” and move on.
** Not to be confused with the “Arnold Palmer”, which is three parts unsweet tea and one part actual lemonade. In the case of an Arnold Palmer, the Lemonade sweetens the tea. I would say that the Arnold Palmer is a perfectly respectable beverage, but not “sweet tea”, but I was raised in Alabama.
*** You can also buy cans or jugs of “Iced Tea”, but that’s marketing departments for you.
Note that “Iced Tea” and “Sweet Tea” are overlapping categories, but “Unsweet Tea” is absolutely a thing, and is almost always iced. Although there are, in fact, people who drink “unsweet tea” as ordered, it is very often an excuse for the drinker to take care of the sweetening themselves because they don’t know who decided how sweet the tea would be***. (Alternately, they want to use artificial sweeteners.) Some restaurants avoid this problem altogether by just serving “Unsweet Tea” and having a shaker of sugar the size of a 20-ounce beer can on the table. Meals served in these restaurants usually subtract from your total lifespan, but are also usually worth it.
Also, while it’s easy and entertaining for us to mock the Brits on their tea choices, it’s worth noting that when it gets into the high 70s there, it’s considered a heat wave and people die, whereas that’s a moderate summer day in Virginia. I suspect if I lived in a place where a 75F day in August was considered unusual, I might drink my tea hot more often.
Iced tea is for when it’s 110 in the shade, and there ain’t no shade. And, for many Texans, there is no thing as “a little” sugar – you load in the sugar until there is a sludge of sugar at the bottom of the glass that won’t dissolve no matter how much you stir it. A super-saturated tea/sugar solution.
(I don’t drink tea myself, I have a weird reaction to it, an allergy to some ingredient I think.)
Yeah, to clarify for the Brits, here’s the weather where I am RIGHT NOW, and I put it in Celsius for you:
You can see why we prefer our drinks cold in summer.
Also, I should emphasize you don’t make hot tea and iced tea the same way. You’re probably thinking of the nasty bitter “I forgot my bag was brewing,” and it isn’t like that. What you do is you boil about 1L of water with teabags to taste (I use eight), fill a pitcher to the brim with ice, and when your boiling tea is super nice and dark and a bit murky you pour it IMMEDIATELY over the ice. The tannins that create that bitter flavor have no time to develop.
lord-jen-grey:Like Petals FallingOn a seemingly mundane day at the library, Claire comes into work to find a note and a flower awaiting her on her desk. It appears to be written by a secret admirer. Her husband, Frank, has recently informed her of his …
statell:
Imaginary – CrossingInStyle – Outlander Series – Diana Gabaldon [Archive of Our Own]
New Chapter Posted by CrossingInStyle….so excited to see this new chapter…
So, by “most of” I guess you mean the nine or so in which she looks like she’s been sucking on a pickle and he is…whatever that is. And by “a few” you mean the endless supply we’ve been collecting since 2013? It might seem like it to you if you’re tapping your foot while you wait for the next Tait shot to come along for us to react to, but we don’t disregard them. We roll our eyes and laugh and laugh and talk amongst ourselves about how stupid it’s all getting and then we throw a buck into the pot and bet on who will get the next anon who’’s been flipping through those nine pictures and sighing longingly because that is their idea of true love. (I win!)