True Southern Sweet Tea is becoming a lost art. When my Katie whipped up a batch out in California, one of her friends tried to persuade her to make batches of it to sell “I can hear the banjos when I take a sip,” he swore.
That’s how you know that you’ve got the good stuff; you hear banjos when you drink it. Proper sweet tea is so southern it takes you South of the Mason-Dixon with a single sip.
While I enjoy a nice glass of traditional Southern Sweet Tea, I also prefer a more bougie version. If you enjoy fruity-flavored sweet teas, you will love this recipe.
Ingredients:
- 2 cups of water
- 1-2 bags of fruit-flavored tea (the high-class bougie brand stuff). My favorite is Bigelow Perfect Peach.
- 4-5 bags of plain Lipton tea. The cheap tagless tea bags actually bring a slightly better flavor to it in my opinion but Lipton will do in a pinch.
- 1/2 to 1 cup of sugar
- Additional water as needed
Boil 2 cups of water. Remove it from the heat and add 1-2 bags of your bougie tea of choice and enough standard tea bags to give you 6 bags total (EX:2 bags flavored tea + 4 bags regular)
Allow the tea bags to steep for five minutes. Any longer and the tea will become bitter.
Remove the tea bags. Do not squeeze the bags. Squeezing the tea bags makes it bitter. You only squeeze the tea bags if you hate the person you’re making the tea for, but this is a tea of love so don’t squeeze the tea bags.
Add your sugar to the liquid and stir until blended completely.
Pour into a half-gallon container (Mason jars are made for this), add enough water to fill the jar, shake well, and serve over ice.
Enjoy!
4 responses to “Bougie Banjo Sweet Tea”
Annie, this is a great series and if you keep it up I could see a Bougie cookbook in your future.
I’ve heard about sweet tea but I’m clearly not Southern as the sugar levels you are using in your iced tea come off as overwhelming to me, but I’m sure you would think the same about the lack of sugar in my unsweetened ice tea. Yet that is the beauty of tea in the very wide range of diversity of all the different types of tea and ways of preparing it.
Why thank you, John! I don’t know the future but I am having fun!
The trick to Southern Sweet Tea is the sweetness. If it barely has any sugar at all, you can tell it wasn’t made by a true Southerner. You LITERALLY cannot put too much sugar in Southern Sweet Tea.
If you like a bit of lemon flavor, squeeze a half of a lemon into a half gallon of tea (6 bags Lipton only).
Seriously, John – I’m actually cooking. ME!
I’m in shock!
I grew up in central Illinois. At family reunions, there were two crocks of tea–one sweet tea and one unsweetened. My mom insisted that there be one unsweetened because she used saccharine to sweeten her tea. I didn’t drink teas as a child but now I wish I had at least tasted that sweet tea so I would know what it is like. As a diabetic now, it would probably not be a good idea for me to make a batch.
Dear Linda,
I suspect a lot of people made both sweet and unsweetened tea. I remember it in the homes of some of my relatives.
The sad part of your story isn’t that you have never tasted sweet tea, but that you missed the chance to drink your family’s sweet tea.
All I can offer you is a hug.