"sweet tea" news and stories

Three of my favorite things converged recently: David Byrne, sweet tea, and booze. Down south, the latter two are common enough on their own, but now Firefly Distillery has combined them with Sweet Tea Flavored Vodka.

I was beyond skeptical when my friend brought a bottle to an outdoor David Byrne show in Atlanta. I'd never even met a canned or bottled sweet tea, or for that matter a flavored vodka, worth spitting at (most necessitate spitting out). I expected something cloying and artificial-tasting.

To my surprise, Firefly exercised remarkable restraint in infusing--or should I say brewing--the vodka with (according to John T. Edge writing for the Gourmet blog) local tea and sweetened with regionally appropriate Louisiana cane sugar. Edge calls it hyper-sweet, but by sweet tea standards it really isn't. He also recommends mixing with lemonade, which my friend also suggested. But such doctoring isn't necessary. Water and ice do the trick.

The smooth dance moves and electrifying vocals of David Byrne aren't necessary, either. But in my opinion, if "the name of the bar, the bar is called Heaven," then it follows that "heaven is a place" where spiked tea and live Talking Heads hits meet.

Kind little rituals seem to go a long way toward making marriage work, so almost every weekend, I make my husband some sweet tea. He's a Southern boy by birth (Brooklynian by marriage), and having a big ol' pitcher easily grabbable in the fridge seems to right any Mason Dixon imbalance he might be suffering at the time. I've got it down to a science, proportion-wise, but this past weekend, his itch for a sugar fix kicked in while I was at the grocery store. What he made tasted divine, but there was just too much for one pitcher, and not enough refrigerator room for a second.

If nothing else, the nuns at St. Scorpacciata instilled in me the mortal fear of wasting food, and seeing how I'd been at the store to buy milk (which neither of us usually drink) for a Bolognese, I decided sherbet would be what saved our souls from eternal damnation. I suppose we won't know for a while if that worked, but it did taste pretty damned delicious.

I was talking to tea-dom's own Emily Thomas about how I loved the weird iced tea she'd made, and to explain the difference between it and mere Snapple. Emily did her impression of Dolly Parton as Truvy Jones in Steel Magnolias exclaiming, "Sweet tea! It's the house wine of the South!"  I shrank back in horror, but then realizing her Dolly impression was over, made a gesture for her to please continue.

"When, I look back on any given memory of my childhood in Florence, South Carolina ," she began, "my mother always seems to appear out of nowhere to refill all of our glasses with sweet iced tea. We drank it more than we drank water.

"This did not seem strange to me until I moved to New York. I ordered sweet tea in a restaurant and the waitress gave me a funny look and said, 'We don't have sweet tea. We have tea and we have sugar.'