How to make Sweet Tea

Every Sunday growing up my family would come home from church and while we ate lunch at the kitchen bar my mother would brew four galleons of sweet tea for the week. Sweet tea was a staple of my mother. She would pour from her glass pitcher over the round half circle ice cubes the refrigerator made; it was practically religious.  During the summer my mom would cut lemon and squeeze it into her drink.

Karen, my mothers friend, would walk across the street after I got home from school and sit with my mom on the front porch in the wicker rocking chairs while they talked and sipped. When I walked outside to get my homework journal signed I would hear bits of their conversations about women in the PTA, or about who had been interviewed on Good Morning America. Karen’s son, Andrew, was my best friend and in my class until fifth grade. We stopped talking when we were sophomores in high school.

My sister never learned how to make sweet tea because she was awful in the kitchen. She was much more like my father who was from New Jersey. My sister got angry quickly, she never read a book from cover to cover, and didn’t have her first paying job until she was a senior in college. Mom taught me how to make sweet tea when I was in the eighth grade.

You can never make tea right your first time, and rarely your second or third. There’s a good bit of feel when you measure the ingredients. To start you need four cups of boiling water. The problem with measuring four cups of water is some of it will boil so you need to put about four and a half into your pot. Before your water comes to a complete boil, you need to start adding a cup of granulated sugar. The sugar needs to be added slowly while you stir the water with one hand so the grains dissolve before they touch the bottom of the pot. If the sugar touches the bottom of your pot before it dissolves it will burn and your tea will taste thick and bitter.

After you’ve mixed all of your sugar into the boiling water you need to take the simple syrup you’ve made off of the stovetop and drop in one galleon size tea bag. My mother always used Lipton tea bags because they came in a family size bulk box at the Lowes foods on the corner. After you’ve taken the syrup off heat you have to let the tea steep for at least twenty minutes. If you leave the tea bag to steep for less then twenty minutes your tea will be weak and if you leave it in for much longer than twenty minutes your tea will be strong. I like my tea a little stronger then my mother made hers.

The worst mistake you can make while brewing sweet tea is to leave your syrup on the stove while it steeps. If the tealeaves continue to be boiled the tea will get very bitter and dry. Once the tea has steeped with the lid on your pot, remove the lid and pull the bag out quickly. There will be some tea trapped in the bag with the leaves but this is too strong so do not press the teabags to drain them.

Now that you have made the concentrated tea, pour it over a galleon pitcher full of ice. The tea is only five cups but as it melts the ice the tea syrup is diluted enough to drink. Pour over ice and enjoy with lemon during the summer or mint leaves during the early spring.