Sweetened iced tea is a staple of the Southern (United States) diet. Everyone drinks it at home, it goes good with any meal, you can order it at just about any restaurant (and refills are limitless and at no additional cost), and you can buy it by the gallon at the grocery store. So, how does a Southerner make sweet tea? Well, I’ve experimented a bit, and here’s the recipe I’m currently using.

Real Southern Sweet Tea

• 3 family-size bags of tea
• 1 1/4 cups pure granulated sugar
• About 2 quarts of room-temperature water

Make the simple syrup before you brew the tea.

Simple Syrup
In a saucepan, bring about 2 cups of water to a boil. Add the sugar to it, and boil it until it dissolves. As soon as it dissolves, pour it into a measuring cup full of ice. You want to cool it as quickly as you can so you can pour it into your tea when it finishes brewing. The goal is to get the syrup to room temperature as quickly as possible.

The Tea
In a saucepan, bring about 2 cups of water to a boil. Remove the saucepan from the heat, and gently place the tea bags in the water. Put a lid on the saucepan and let the tea steep for 4-5 minutes. After steeping the tea, pour it into your jug. Add the simple syrup, which should be very near room temperature, to the tea. Stir a bit. Finally, add the remaining room-temperature water to the tea, and you’re done!

A few tips

• Use purified water. I use water that’s been cycled through a Brita Slim Pitcher. To me, it’s better that way than when from the tap.
• Adjust the sweetness. On the 1 to 10 scale of sweetness, my tea sits around a 7. You may want to tone it down a bit.
• Don’t combine hot tea and cold water or cold syrup. In general, you want to add room-temperature water or syrup to your tea. Otherwise, you’ll end up with foggy tea, which just looks bad.
• Experiment with different brands of tea. I was raised on decaffeinated Luzianne, and I’ve tried a few store brands, but my favorite is caffeinated Red Diamond.
• Don’t squeeze the tea bags. Maybe the worst thing you can do to tea is too squeeze the tea out of the bags and into your pitcher. You can get grounds in the tea, and squeezed tea usually is sour tea.
• Don’t steep the tea for too long. It will get a sour flavor if you steep it too long.
• Seal the tea pitcher. If you don’t seal the tea in its container it can pick up some of the flavors lingering in your fridge. Sweet tea with a hint of raw chicken is not good.
• Be selective about your tea cup. Sweet tea is best when drank from a glass. Solo cups work pretty well, too, and I recently started using styrofoam cups, which aren’t bad. Just don’t ever drink it from a Tupperware or Rubbermaid container. It just doesn’t work.