How To Make Iced Sweet Tea (Video)
A lot of folks have asked me how I make my sweet tea so today I’m bringing you a video showing you exactly how I do it. Hope you’ll join me for a glass!
This is how we make our sweet tea but everyone has their preference. If you prefer a weaker tea, use fewer tea bags. If you like it sweeter, taste it and then add more sugar to suit you. Note: Most restaurants use a much more sugar than this :). We always go through a full gallon a day (at least) but if you have any left you can just store it in the refrigerator and enjoy over the next day or two!
Sweet Tea
- 5 Tea Bags*
- 3/4 Cup sugar (more if you prefer)
- Water
Remove tags from teabags and place in small pot. Fill up pot most of the way with water (exact amount doesn’t matter as long as the tea bags are covered and then some). Place on medium to medium high heat and bring just to a boil. Remove from stove eye and prepare your pitcher.
Fill pitcher halfway (or so) with cold water. Add your sugar**. Add hot tea. Stir until sugar is dissolved and fill remainder of pitcher with cold water. Serve over ice.
*We use Orange Pekoe tea but you can experiment with making iced tea with other teas as well. Earl Grey makes a delicious iced tea!
**I prefer to use Splenda or Ideal Sweetener in my tea but use the same amount as I would were I using sugar.
The trick to having a good smooth tasting tea is to avoid adding hot tea directly to the sugar or sugar directly to the hot tea. This scorches the sugar and creates a very bitter taste in your tea. To avoid this, place cold water in your pitcher first, add your sugar to that, and then pour in your hot tea.
If you have a traditional coffee maker, I talk about how to make sweet tea in that in this post.
Funny Family Stories of Sweet Tea
One time my mother was watching a television talk show and they were talking about how much Southerners love sweet tea. The host said “Well it’s no wonder, they’ve probably been drinking it since they were four!” Mama took objection to this and huffed “Four? I was putting it in your baby bottles by the time you were two!” ~giggles~
My Grandmother Lucille spent a great deal of time at the elbow of my Great Grandmother (Mama Reed) after she was married learning how to cook. A lot of the daughters in law and mothers gathered at Mama Reed’s house on Sundays to help prepare the big meal. Shortly after Grandmama joined the clan she was given the task of making the Sweet Tea. Back then it was made in a large glass recycled pickle jar. Grandmama poured the hot tea directly into the jar and set to stirring it up vigorously with a long handled metal spoon. A few clinks later and the jar shattered, sending sticky sweet tea all over Mama Reed’s clean kitchen floor. Everyone had a good and gracious laugh about it but Grandmama said “I liked to never got the sticky off’n that floor!”
How young were you when you started drinking sweet tea?
Do you have any special or funny memories of Sweet Tea in your family?
I’ll pick one of the comments below to win a Luzianne Prize Pack
Winner announced on this post and notified tomorrow evening. Giveaway closes at noon central time Friday, July 1st.
This Giveaway is now closed. Congratulations to Joan Whitaker! I’ve been in contact with Joan and given her directions on how to claim her prize. Have a great day and thank you!
Disclaimer: This post was not sponsored by Luzianne nor was I compensated for doing it. I just think it’s awfully good tea. I also think y’all need to go make some right now.
“Don’t wait for people to be friendly, show them how.”
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I don’t really know when I was first introduced to sweet tea. We never really had any other kind of tea in the house, so i’m guessing it was early. I don’t love it like my husband does. I try to keep a pitcher of it in the refrigerator and usually make a gallon to take to potlucks or cookouts. Since we’ve moved up here in Northern VA/DC you can’t hardly find sweet tea unless its at McDonald’s. If they only knew what they were missing out on!
I’m originally from PA (now enjoying sweet tea in the beautiful state of Virginia), and we never had “sweet tea”. It was always unsweetened tea, and you sweeten it yourself, which is just not the same. My husband, who is from the south, asked for sweet tea at a diner in PA once, and the waitress looked at him very funny, then asked, “Do you mean flavored tea?” He ended up with raspberry flavored tea that day!
Well I guess my northern family was the only ones there that drank iced tea of course it was sweet and we always had it during the summer months. It was a lot cheaper to make tea than to buy coke. Coke was a treat and we only got it on rare occasions. Used to take the bottles back to get enough money for penny candy too! We always had Tetley for the tea though and mom would always make it sweet and then add lemon concentrate to it (she always had a big bottle of that). I didnt like it with the lemon so usually she would pour me a glass beforehand and then add the lemon to the rest. Still dont like lemon in my tea to this day or lemonade either.
I’ve been drinking sweet tea all my life. My kids have had it in their bottles too. At home, I make it with artificial sweetner to reduce my calorie intake, but when we’re out, we always order sweet tea. My two year old ‘s first complex sentence was “Sweet tea with light ice please” which he’ll say when he sees a drive through. I live in northern Virginia now, and Luzianne is hard to find, but it is my favorite. I love your stories…they make me feel at home.
I live in northern Virginia too Anita! I didn’t realize Luzianne was so hard to find, but sometimes we go out to the super walmart if we’re down in Front Royal, Luray or Martinsburg. I think they usually have it there, but that’s a long way to drive if you’re not already going there!
I can’t remember when I started drinking sweet tea, just that it was always available at my house. Not to sound like a traitor to the south, but I prefer tea without any sweetener – yes – unsweetened iced tea! Now – for my story – my daughter, God love her, was baby sitting for her now brother in law. He wanted sweet tea, so she was attempting to make tea in the “Tea maker”. I don’t know what she did, but she said she suddenly smelled tea and when she returned to the kitchen there was tea everywhere, shooting out of the pot,pouring on the floor, everywhere she looked! She has solemnly sworn never to use a teamaker again! (what happened to steeping in a pot?) Funny enough, her mother in law, gave her a teamaker at her bridal shower! We are still laughing and wondering who is going to make the tea at her house!!!
Well, everybody makes it different. I worked at Johnny Rays in BHM while I was in college (15-20 years ago) and we always mixed the sugar with the hot tea. Put the sugar in the bottom of the pitcher and then add the tea/water. Love your posts and really enjoy what you bring to Southern cooking. Thank you.
my mom always insisted on hot water to dilute the tea….said that if you used cold water it made the tea cloudy. she would boil the water for the tea bags, then boil up the same amount of water to dilute the steeped tea. And if her tea ever did get cloudy, she would add a small quantity of boiling water and it would clear. (she REALLY insisted that her tea NOT have a cloudy appearance lol!) I recall her adding sugar to it before it went into the fridge while it was still hot, but come to think of it, she never did pour the boiling water over the sugar.
I have a friend from southern Virginia and he likes to tell of going to family reunions and having all of the aunts and grandmas handing out glasses of ‘their’ tea – ‘here, try my tea’….like a competition! They all seemed to have some ‘secret’ ingredient they would use to make their tea ‘the best’. Only ‘secret ingredient’ he ever managed to wheedle out of one of them was that they used a pinch of cream of tartar 🙂
Bring on the sweet tea!!