Sweet Tea Time - Southern Retailer Struggles to Keep Tradition Alive

While sweet tea has hardly vanished from the Southern diet, cut-glass pitchers of the homebrewed stuff have gradually disappeared from the region's refrigerators as more drinkers turn to powdered mixes and premade teas.

Now Hammacher Schlemmer, the New York-based retailer best known for offering airline travelers gadgets they never knew they needed, is trying to resuscitate sweet-tea traditions with its Authentic Southern Sweet Tea Brewer, a machine that reportedly makes brewing a fresh pot of sweet tea as easy as pulling through the drive-thru at McDonald's (which saw its monthly sales jump 6 percent after belatedly adding sweet tea to its menu in 2007).

Southerners have been drinking sweet tea for at least 150 years, when temperance advocates probably started leaving the booze out of popular tea punches. Sugary tea wasn't unknown outside the South, but folks sweltering below the Mason-Dixon line zealously embraced the cooling beverage.

Whether the drink's sweetness was an especially good foil to fried foods and vinegary greens, as author Fred Thompson theorized in "Iced Tea," or whether it resonated with Southerners who'd grown up snacking on sugar cane, it soon became "the house wine of the South," in the words of Dolly Parton's "Steel Magnolias" character.

But many Southerners have lately been drinking swill. Rather than adding what any sensible tea drinker would probably consider too much simple syrup to just-brewed orange pekoe tea – an art now practiced primarily by waitresses across the South – sweet tea fans are buying corn-syrupy, ready-to-drink gallons from supermarkets.

That's a development unlikely to make Northerners shudder, but it's still slightly scandalous in the tea-proud South, where a Georgia legislator in 2003 was cheered for proposing (facetiously, he claimed) a bill that would have made not serving sweet tea in a restaurant a prosecutable misdemeanor.

Enter the Authentic Southern Sweet Tea Brewer, a $49.95 contraption which spokeswoman Breanna O'Day says automatically adds the user's preferred amount of sugar to 204 degree F hot tea.

"There's not anything else like it," O'Day says. "We've sold out of it a couple times already."

She adds that because her company doesn't track where the machines are sold, there's no telling whether Southerners account for the majority of Brewer users. But the numbers mean many more Americans, no matter where they live, will be toasting summer in old-fashioned Southern style this year.