Sunday, May 1, 2011

What kind of tea is sweet tea usually made of?


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: sweet tea

Why: We are making sweet tea vodka. I have a lot of tea - mostly green, a little black, some not really "tea" at all. Did you know that black, oolong, green, and white teas are all made from the same Camellia sinensis plant? It's true! The leaves and buds are just grown, harvested, or processed differently.

Answer: Black tea! True facts:
  • The oldest known recipe for sweet iced tea - published in an 1879 community cookbook called Housekeeping in Old Virginia by Texan Marion Cabell Tyree - called for green tea.
  • Most early sweet tea was made of green tea.
  • During WWII, the U.S. was cut off from the major sources of green tea (Asian places), so we only had the tea that came from British-controlled India, which was all black.
  • Since WWII, Americans have been drinking mostly black tea as iced tea.
Source: Wikipedia

The More You Know: The custom of drinking tea and having that whole snack/mealtime in the British Empire originated when Catherine of Bragança married Charles II in 1661. She brought the practice of drinking tea in the afternoon with her from Portugal.

Anyway, we ended up just using some Irish Breakfast to make our sweet tea vodka. I mean, Irish breakfast indeed!

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