Sweet Tea Recipe: 6 Tips for Making Flavorful Sweet Tea

Sweet tea is a black tea that you brew hot, sweeten with sugar, and then refrigerate until it’s ice-cold. It’s a common drink in the southern United States, like in Georgia, North Carolina, and the surrounding areas. Recipes for sweet tea vary according to region, family, and personal preferences, but the staples are black tea bags and sugar.

What sets sweet tea apart from regular iced tea is that it does not include lemon. Lemon slices or lemon wedges often accompany sweet tea on the side, but there is no lemon juice in the actual sweet tea. Black tea itself has a bitter taste because of the tannins it contains, similar to how some wines are richer in tannins. Additionally, sweet tea usually includes more sugar or another sweetener than regular iced tea to cut through the black tea’s natural bitterness. While there is a theory that adding baking soda can neutralize the bitterness in black tea, that information is false.

Factors that impact how you make your sweet tea include the accessibility of ingredients, the desired taste, and any family recipes passed down to you through the generations. Here are some tips you can follow to produce the best results possible:

• Don’t fully boil the water. Bring a gallon of cold water to an almost boil in a large pot over high heat. It’s ready when the bottom surface of the pot is full of bubbles just starting to rise to the surface. Once the small bubbles start rising to the top, turn off the heat and add the tea bags. Keep the water temperature below 212 degrees Fahrenheit (or 100 degrees Celsius), the temperature at which water boils. Boiling water tends to make the tea bitter and essentially cooks out the delicate and nuanced flavor of the tea. Hot water heated to 190–195 degrees Fahrenheit is a good temperature, but you can try the bubble test if you can’t use a thermometer.
• Flavor with herbs. Southern sweet tea is traditionally unflavored, but other flavorings add more depth. One of sweet tea’s early forms in history was an alcoholic punch with fresh mint and cream. The modern mint julep cocktail derives from that punch. In the spirit of sweet tea’s origins, try using sprigs of mint, basil, lemon thyme, and even rosemary to flavor your tea base. The addition of sugar will enhance the flavor of the herbs.
• Make a simple syrup. Instead of adding white, granulated sugar to the hot or warm tea so it can dissolve before the tea cools, make a simple syrup. To a small saucepan, add equal parts sugar and water. Bring the ingredients to a boil and cook them just until the sugar dissolves, less than one minute. You can always add more sugar to the tea after it cools if you want to make it sweeter.
• Make iced tea ice cubes. Try serving sweet tea over ice cubes made of sweet tea instead of ice cubes of just water. As the ice cubes melt, they won’t dilute the sweet tea the same way melted water ice cubes do.
• Switch up the kind of tea. The first published sweet tea recipe called for green tea, so you might try using green tea bags or green tea leaves instead of the modern traditional black tea. Flavored tea bags, such as peach tea or lavender tea, can work well. Flavored teas are not usually sweet, so you don’t have to worry about over-sweetening the tea.
• Use an alternate sweetener. There are more ways to sweeten sweet tea beyond using regular white sugar. Other options include a simple syrup, artificial sweeteners, honey, agave nectar, and even maple syrup.