How Sweet Tea Became the Signature Drink of the South

Where I come from on the coastal plains of Georgia, we drink tea. The sweet and the iced are implied. You trust that your neighbor, the local meat and three, and the ladies at church know just how much sugar to add. Packets of sugar are for coffee.

At home, mama did not make sweet tea, and she only let us swirl in anemic packets of Sweet’N Low. To get my fix, I walked barefoot atop crunchy, parched grass to my neighbors’ house. There, Mrs. Denise, a second mother whose name my sister and I abbreviated to “Nise,” had the good stuff in a gallon pitcher in her fridge. She brewed it in a teamaker permanently enshrined on her kitchen counter. I remember watching and waiting as hot tea drip-dropped onto a mound of cane sugar, which transformed into a concentrated, viscous syrup.

Of course, no one needs 25 grams of sugar in an otherwise perfectly good glass of iced tea. But the sugar conveys a certain generosity of spirit. It’s a hard-earned indulgence after a day of labor in the sun, surviving summer in Florida with no air conditioning as my parents did, or hell, merely pumping your own gas in August. (A dear friend says you can almost always trust gas station sweet tea.)

“Do not underestimate the importance of a cooling beverage in the South,” says Robert F. Moss, restaurant critic for Charleston’s Post & Courier and a contributing editor to Southern Living, who will host a Lowcountry Tailgate at this year’s Food & Wine Classic in Charleston. “Sitting on a porch with a big glass of iced-anything really, but with sweet tea, you can see how that would be doubly appealing if you’re in a 90°F summer.”

There’s also the sweet, if not short-lived, sugar high. My metabolism leans hypoglycemic. At lunchtime, it only takes a few gulps of sweet tea to calm a low-simmering rage. The sugar would hit my bloodstream, followed by a caffeine jolt. I also know that if I pull up to a restaurant in Fayetteville, North Carolina, or Pearl, Mississippi, and they serve sweet tea, no one will be offended if I call the hostess “ma’am.” My accent, muted by 15 years of living in New York City, will softly, slowly unfurl. Below the sweet tea line, the drink transcends class, race, and region. It is knowing.

Of course, there are geographical and familial sweet tea preferences. Nise brews with Tetley tea, the same brand that her mama used. A friend from Tennessee swears by Luzianne, and his mama casts judgment on households that brew with Lipton.

“I keep telling people that Luzianne is to tea what White Lily is to flour,” he says, “but no one listens.” Some folks add a pinch of baking soda to tame tea’s natural bitter and tannic qualities. A sprig of mint from the garden is acceptable.

Southerners also know what sweet tea is not. My grandma Pat — a Midwesterner by birth with the curse of diabetes, bless her heart — made instant Lipton tea. Undrinkable. Alcoholic “hard sweet tea,” popularized by Firefly Distillery in the mid-2000s, tastes like a tailgate gone bad. Despite their sugar content, Snapple and Arizona iced teas, or any tea-like beverages with added “natural flavors” or malic acid, are not sweet tea.

In general, I don’t mess with sweet tea that comes in a single-serve bottle. It’s a drink meant to be shared. Now, a jug is another matter entirely. It’s acceptable to pick up a plastic jug of sweet tea from the grocery store, preferably Piggly Wiggly or IGA, and bring it to a potluck or barbecue. This year, Milo’s Tea Company, headquartered in Bessemer, Alabama, is on track to brew and sell some 250 million gallons of legit tea, the majority of it sweet and sold in jugs.

The origins of sweet tea

Sweet iced tea, says Moss, is a relatively modern phenomenon in the South. Despite its association with the region, sweet tea did not originate there, but it rather acclimated to our region over time. Moss calls this “Southernization,” or the process by which something takes on a Southern identity. Shania Twain, pimento cheese, fried green tomatoes, kudzu, pickup trucks, and my Ohio-born college roommate Liz all went through a similar metamorphosis.

Iced tea began to appear in American newspapers in the 1850s. One travel report from Russia explained that in summer months, locals consumed “not only iced wine, iced water, and iced beer, but also iced tea is drunk in immense quantities.”

Ice, which had to be harvested from frozen lakes, was a luxury. This novel beverage, iced tea, had a break-out moment in 1868, when a nationally syndicated column in New England Farmer extolled its virtues: “During the heated term, there is nothing so invigorating as iced tea. A slice of lemon no thicker than a wafer placed in each tumbler adds to the relish.”

Within decades, iced tea, mostly green tea and often sweetened, had become a trendy summer drink, the rosé of its time. The first recorded recipe, notably sweetened after chilling, appeared in Housekeeping in Old Virginia in 1879, and the drink got a hardy marketing push from the 1904 World’s Fair, where iced tea outsold hot tea. Southerners clearly drank iced tea at the time, but without their own ice reservoirs or commercial refrigeration, it remained a rarefied treat.

So how did iced tea morph into sweet tea and become a marker of Southern identity? Storytellers and mythmakers like to point to America’s first tea plantation, established in 1888 in Summerville, South Carolina.

The owner, Dr. Charles Shepard, cultivated a whopping 100 acres of tea, which amounted to barely a drop in America’s tea production. Still, the town of Summerville has taken the creative license to market itself, dubiously, as “The Birthplace of Sweet Tea.”

Other fact-stretchers have tried to tie the rise of sweet tea to the South’s famous, boozy iced punches. Tea has long provided a bitter backbone for complex alcoholic beverages. But as someone who’s filled a Home Depot bucket with Chatham Artillery Punch, I can assure you that there’s no logical throughline between liquor-infused punches and sipping sweet tea at a Sunday lunch with churchgoing kin and friends.

There is a lot of overlap between America’s Bible Belt and the sweet tea line. Where I grew up, Baptists, Pentecostals, and folks who attended the Church of God did not drink alcohol, or at least drove to the next county over to visit the liquor store. They were raised, as the saying goes, on Jesus and sweet tea. “Drinking wine with dinner was just not something very many families would do, but you don’t want to just have water,” says Moss. “Teas, in my experience, filled that role.”

And, God forbid, you’re seen drinking alcohol in public. A Georgia newpaper, The Weekly Columbus Enquirer-Sun, noted in 1878, “An iced-tea saloon is the latest Augusta want. Beer and such are too hot in their effects, while lemonade and soda are not sufficiently stimulating. Hence, the necessity for a compromise.”

Sweet tea as Southern culture

Religion, both Moss and I suspect, played a significant role in sweet tea’s Southern adoption. But as with many things in the South, there’s sometimes a darker, more complicated story.

Before the late 19th century, tea cost more than coffee. After the British established rule over Sri Lanka and India, they founded tea plantations that, enabled by an indentured labor force, flooded the market with inexpensive black tea.

Sugar, too, is inextricable from the legacy of slavery. In the United States, it’s a Southern crop, and Louisiana native Norbert Rillieux developed the process to refine sugar mechanically in 1843, an innovation that brought to market cheap, industrial sugar. And in 1868 —iced tea’s big year — New Orleans cut the ribbon on the world’s first commercial ice plant. A wave of Southern ice manufacturing and the introduction of ice boxes in homes made chilled beverages even more accessible.

These were hard times in the Reconstruction South, a region devastated by war, Jim Crow laws, and still bitterly, violently clinging to its old hierarchies. But along came sweet tea, a drink previously reserved for the elite, now an affordable luxury for the everyman.

Sweetness, as author Imani Perry reminds us, is integral to Southern culture. In her book, South to America, the Alabama-born writer, historian, and scholar explores, among many ideas, what sugar represents to Southerners.

“I wanted to talk about what it meant for people who had such hardscrabble lives, and with limited resources, wanting a little bit of sweetness and wanting to give a little sweetness to each other,” she told Traci Thomas on The Stacks podcast. “That is tenderness. It’s balm.”

This inclination toward sweetness is our inheritance. It’s pressed into generational flavor memories, embodied by sweet tea.

Tricia Wallwork is the third-generation owner and CEO of Milo’s. Her grandparents started the business in 1946 as a walk-up hamburger stand that catered to blue-collar workers and miners in North Birmingham. When her parents joined the business, they noticed that people stopped by just for the tea, and they started to sell jugs of it in a local Piggly Wiggly in 1989.

Wallwork says they still make tea just like her grandfather, but on an industrial scale. “We never add colors or preservatives to our product. You cannot do that with tea and produce a homemade taste,” she says. “Southern folks remember the tea our grandmas made.”

Now, Wallwork leads 800 employees at three tea plants (a fourth is on the way) and distributes tea in all 50 states across 60,000 retail locations. Chick-Fil-A in Atlanta and New York City both sell sweet tea. McDonald’s added it in 2006. Nielson data shows that ready-to-drink sweet tea sales in Philadelphia, New York, and Los Angeles run neck-in-neck with Atlanta and Nashville.

But sweet tea still belongs to Southerners. It’s a language. It informs how we walk through the world.

I remember touring the Okefenokee swamp as a grade-schooler. The jet-black water, our guide told us, wasn’t dirty. All the leaves from the oak and cypress trees had steeped in the slow-moving water, just like tea. I found a sermon online that explained how God makes you into sweet tea. To decipher its message, you must understand the nuances of pre-sweetening tea. When you add sugar at the end, the sermon explained, you can stir and stir and stir, but “it’s nearly impossible to get it sweet enough.”

For Erick Williams, the owner and chef of Chicago’s Southern-inspired Virtue, sweet tea is a place and a feeling as much as it is a beverage. “When I think about sweet tea, I think about porches,” he says. “It feels like a good day to me. I’m sitting in a rocking chair, relaxing and looking at a beautiful landscape.”

In that vision, sweet tea is the South idealized, our best and sweetest selves. But Williams doesn’t drink much of it. The Chicago native grew up on Kool-Aid, and he’s more likely to use sweet tea as the base of a brine for meats, the focus of his September 28 seminar, “Sweet Tea & Pork Chops,” at the Food & Wine Classic in Charleston.

Brining, he says, can get a little geeky. “Essentially, you’re creating an environment for osmosis. Osmosis being the exchange from one place to another,” he says. “Brining allows you to season a thing internally and externally. Over time, there will be an exchange of some of the natural juices of a pork chop with a seasoned liquid that now fills those cell walls.”

A sweet-tea brine makes for a juicier, more flavorful pork chop, but it’s also as good of a metaphor as any to explain how sweet tea became the signature beverage of the South. It’s a drink that’s been embraced for more than a century, one that changed us.

One that seasoned the South from the inside out.