Summer ain't summer without some REAL sweet tea!

If you haven't already heard, June is National Iced Tea Month, and rightfully so. It's the season of backyard barbecues, and nothing goes better with summer sun than a sweet glass of iced tea. 

But you better be drinking the real thing.

Iced_Tea_from_flickr.jpg

During the soon-to-come blistering afternoons, you'll likely be tempted to pick up a bottled tea at the corner or run through the drive-thru for that incessantly advertised 1.99 sweet tea, but shouldn't your palate be a bit pickier?  

You can make your own. A whole vat of it. Easily. 

First, choose your favorite blend and brew. Then, add your sugar or simple syrup to your tea while it's still hot, as the temperature allows for the tea to become super-saturated with your sweetener (none of that sugar-sinking-to-the-bottom business). Finally, chill. 

In fact, chill with us! Come celebrate National Iced Tea Month at the shop. We're giving away FREE glasses of iced tea this Saturday, June 7 from Noon to 4 p.m. Stop by, enjoy a true summertime tradition, and pick up a few blends to sweeten and chill at home. Sweet or straight, with lemon or mint, we at Special-Teas, Etc. like our iced tea only one way--homemade.

Now, it wouldn't be fair to bring up National Iced Tea Month without ending with some interesting trivia:

  • As an April Fool's joke in 2003, members of the Georgia House of Representatives presented a bill making it "a 'misdemeanor of a high and aggravated nature' to sell iced tea in a restaurant that did not also offer sweet tea on the menu."  The bill never made it to a vote. (Bummer.)

  • Dolly Parton's character in the film Steel Magnolias called sweet tea "the house wine of the South."

  • Authentic southern sweet tea is often found to contain more sugar than a can of Coca Cola. (Yikes!)

  • Our friends Summerville, South Carolina have proclaimed their plantation as the "birthplace of sweet tea" and offer a sweet tea trail through their historic town.

  • Sweet Tea stretches beyond the Carolinas and Georgia. Texans like their sweet tea, too...so much that ABC News's "What Would You Do?" used a couple of cute "Sweet Tea Swindlers" for a fun summertime bit...