a dishsweet tea

Black tea brewed strong, sweetened with sugar while hot — so it dissolves, rather than being stirred into a cold glass — and poured over ice. It is the drink of the Carolina barbecue house in both states and every sauce region: sold by the glass, the quart and the gallon, brewed on the stove at Grady's in Dudley, named by Dukes in Orangeburg among the five things people come for, and served, Wikipedia says, wherever whole hog is. Some cooks temper it with a pinch of baking soda against bitterness; lemon is the usual addition. Its presence on a menu is one sign used to tell whether a place counts as the South.

Sweet tea began as a luxury of three shipped-in things — tea, sugar and ice, the ice the dearest — and became cheap when all three did. The oldest known recipe for it is in Housekeeping in Old Virginia, a community cookbook compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree (copyright 1878, and dated 1879 by the historian Robert Moss): ice, sugar, hot green tea, lemon. Green tea was the tea of the 19th-century South; the Second World War cut off its sources and black tea from British India took its place, and by the war's end black tea was the American tea. Moss, checking Summerville, South Carolina's 2013 claim to be 'The Birthplace of Sweet Tea' — a trademarked tagline, a Sweet Tea Trail and billboards on I-26 and I-95, resting on Dr. Charles Shepard's Pinehurst Tea Plantation of 1888–1915, the first successful tea farm in the country — found the Boston Journal recommending iced tea in July 1868, twenty years before Shepard planted, and Fannie Farmer's 1896 Boston Cooking-School Cook Book telling readers to pour tea over cracked ice and sweeten to taste. Summerville answered with a jar: 'Mason', fifteen feet tall, filled on National Tea Day 2016 with 2,524 gallons of sweet tea, the world's largest, a record traded since 2010 among Chick-fil-A, Summerville and Lipton. In 2003 a Georgia House bill, apparently an April Fool's joke, would have made selling iced tea without offering sweet tea a misdemeanor; it never came to a vote.

Tea bags or loose black tea steep in a pot of boiling water — some cooks add a pinch of baking soda — and the sugar goes in while the tea is hot; cold water and ice bring it down. At Grady's, Gerri Grady brews it on the stovetop for the day's service; at Allen & Son Keith Allen brewed it himself and sold it by the litre. It is served in a tall glass over ice, with lemon if you want it. Pits sell it to go by the pint, quart, half gallon and gallon — Parker's in Wilson lists all four — and the Barbecue Center in Lexington prices it from a 10-ounce cup to the gallon jug. The sugar can run to 22 degrees Brix, twice a Coca-Cola.

Lexington Barbecue: 'Iced Tea (Unsweet on Request)', $2.90 cash, $3.00 card (September 2026). The Barbecue Center: 10 oz $2.50, 16 oz $2.90, 32 oz $3.75, half gallon $6.00, gallon $8.50. Summerville holds a Sweet Tea Festival each September and keeps the record jar.