A friend of mine who has been a bartender for years at a Mexican restaurant brought this subject up to me the other day and I found it quite amusing.

He said that there are customers who will ask if they have "Sweet Tea," rather than just plain tea... when he replies that they have both tea and sugar and that they can sweeten it to their liking, they invariably decline and order some other beverage.

"It just ain't the same" is the phrase that he says he hears the most as customers decline his offer of plain tea.

Does anyone on here believe that pre-sweetened tea is somehow better than regular tea that you sweeten yourself? I am of the opinion that tea is tea and you can sweeten that shit yourself, thereby making the idea that you have to get "sweet tea" very stupid. I could be very wrong...

Has anyone else who has worked in restaurants seen this phenomenon?

Well in the south, tea is served both pre-sweetened and unsweetened.

The biggest difference is, what sugar you decide to sweeten with.

If it's an artifical sweetener then it leaves an aftertaste that most people don't like. However, it does melt quickly in hot or cold tea.

If you use regular sugar and the tea is ice cold, then the sugar won't melt, so you have unsweetened tea on the top and super sugary at the bottom.

LaVisHh said:

Oooops... I take it that you prefer pre-sweetened tea???

IceNine said:

You BAAAD...

CherryMoon said:

Damn... that could be the answer that I am looking for. I didn't think about that at all... a fine point has been made.

Ice you are baaad!

IceNine said:

Now that is a great flame!

...um, I mean, I prefer hot tea to cold!

Sweet Tea is awful... I used to be forced to drink it when we lived in North Carolina though... EVERYONE had sweet tea.

I prefer iced tea... no sweetener, no flavor, no nothing.

I'm impressed...I have to admit I clicked right away...

Let's not forget the topic at hand, please...

This thread is actually not a flame about a certain org personality, but was honestly inspired by my friend's comments the other day.

I thought that it was very amusing that people would refuse to take regular tea and sweeten it themselves.

IceNine said:

Let's see... IceNine, you like your tea with just the right amount of Equal brand Aspartame sweetener eh?!

If "memory" serves!

IceNine said:

:LOL:

Diva said:

Precisely!

Equal is my sweetener of choice.

Am I the only person that thinks sweet tea is sick?

Just give me regular tea, please.

Yes, I have experienced this myself! When I was a teenager, I worked for Wendy's for about 3.5 years, and every now and then, a customer would ask if we had sweetened iced tea. I'd explain that it was unsweetened, but that we also had sugar and artificial sweetener packets available for their use. And 100% of the time, I got the same response that your bartender friend gets: they'd decline and ask for something else.

Based upon the accents of these customers, I eventually came to the conclusion that sweet tea must be a Southern thing. (I'm a New Englander by birth who now primarily lives in the Midwest, but I still have a summer home in Maine.)

Then, during my senior year of high school, a girl from South Carolina moved into town and enrolled at my high school. I took at least one class with her, and one day I finally asked her:

1) Is sweet tea a Southern thing? (Answer: Yes!)

2) How is it different from adding sugar to unsweetened tea? (Her answer was, essentially, "It just ain't the same.")

This post reminds me...

During that same year, our spring band trip was to Atlanta. We stayed at a hotel there, and one morning they set up a breakfast buffet for us. I was walking down the buffet line with my plate, and I saw what appeared to be mashed potatoes. I thought, "Mashed potatoes for breakfast?" But I like mashed potatoes, so I added some to my plate.

Of course, after one bite, I realized that they weren't mashed potatoes--they were grits! Blah.

matt said:

GRITS!!!

You were in the South!

:LOL:

Essentially, it's because sweetened tea is a good distribution of tea and sugar, before water is added. Therefore, the tea and sugar is pre-mixed and you don't end up with a glop of sugar hanging out at the bottom of your drink - the only "sweet" part.

LaVisHh said:

Actually, if you're willing to let your tea sit there for a while, it will dissolve and stir in uniformly. Perhaps the people who order a different beverage are in a real hurry.

teller said:

:LOL:

Classic!

"Give me a Diablo sandwich and a Dr. Pepper and make it fast! I'm in a goddamned hurry!" - Buford T. Justice

teller said:

True...but it still seems to taste different. Perhaps the part where it dissolved first tends to be where the sugar attaches itself to the tea, therefore, it will never quite be uniform.

I hate grits.

And has anyone ever had those hominy things. GROSS!!!

So back to the initial question.

It's entirely up to the individual.

LaVisHh said:

:LOL:

OK, I know too much about this subject.

Usually the tea is made hot, the sugar is added and then chilled. As opposed to adding the sugar to cold tea.

So, you have the effect of the sugar distributing itself better in a hot environment. Thereby promoting a total cohesiveness of flavor.

(Can you guess that I lived in the south for a while or what)

CherryMoon said:

You DO know your tea!

CherryMoon said:

You just haven't had a good bowl of grits then! You need to put some melted cheese, butter, salt and pepper to make them really good!

Sorry for the off-topic response...

so maybe i'm a little slow but i read everyone's post here & i STILL HAVE NO FUCKING IDEA WHAT SWEET TEA IS!!!

ThaHumanBody said:

Tea with sugar in it to sweeten it.