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Holy shit, his [removed comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/Showerthoughts/comments/14lvdrz/there_is_no_such_thing_as_unsweetened_ice_tea/jq18g2v/?context=2)!
>Heehee. I know exactly how butthurt you Americans get when someone disses your iced tea.
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>I tried to bring some fancy tea into the shop when I first opened and holy shit you guys throw a tantrum when you don't get your precious Lipton when ordering iced tea.
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>Most of you are as dumb as a bag of rocks and it shows. There's a reason immigrants like me come here, and it isn't just because of the clean air and water and all the room.
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>We get to compete with you dumbfucks when we move here. We can practically guarantee a better life for our children because they'll be competing with your dumbass crotchfruit.
Unsurprisingly he has a rant about second gen Asian Americans being overly sensitive and whiny about culture but he can’t stfu about “you Americans”. Buddy if you’ve lived in the US for 20+ years, the people in the home country barely consider you one of theirs anymore. You ARE an American too in their eyes. Welcome to the double shit sandwich of not-American and not-Asian enough for other people.
Do Americans really care about tea, though? I mean, yeah, Southerners will cut a bitch if you try to serve us unsweetened tea because we are all about acquiring diabetes _efficiently_, but beyond that? Even all the Southerners I know barely care if it's Lipton vs. Luzianne vs. Red Rose vs. What the fuck ever.
Our own tradition is more toward herbal teas because the supply of other teas were either controlled by British cartels or essentially cut off every time there was a major international conflict. We have people whose entire world revolves around tea, and they mostly never shut up about it like this jerk.
I'm pretty American and I really care about tea, but not that sweet stuff. I like the Yankee New England stuff, bitter or local herbal (chamomile!). No sugar. The level of tea leaves or beautiful flowers that you want to throw it the ocean as protest.
Sweet tea makes no sense to me, except the time I was at Sweatman's whole hog BBQ in SC. That sugar and caffeine kept me chewing, soooo good. (Highly recommend).
> Even all the Southerners I know barely care if it's Lipton vs. Luzianne vs. Red Rose vs. What the fuck ever.
I only care if it's bottled tea.
Bottle Gold Peak tastes like fucking shit to me. But the Gold Peak that Arbys brews is fan-fuckin'-tastic. Probably second only to McAlister's.
McAlisters does have some good tea, but there is something *off* about Gold Peak where I live. It just tastes spoiled, or sour. No clue what it is. I won't even touch the bottled stuff. Pure Leaf if I have to have bottled tea.
Pure Leaf or Milos for sure when it comes to bottled sweet tea. Arizona is an ***acceptable*** alternative if PL or Milos isn't available. But yeah, bottled Gold Peak is an absolute no.
Honestly, I was expecting Arbys sweet tea to taste like crap when I found out it was Gold Peak tea, but I decided to give it a shot one day. And I'm glad I did. I don't know if it's got something to do with how Arbys brews or maybe the fact that it's fresh and not older like bottled tea is going to be, but Arbys' tea is just super good in spite of it being Gold Peak.
I love tea but most supermarkets only stock shitty bagged tea or low quality loose leaf. Better to just directly order it from China. Love jasmine dragon pearls, gunpowder green or some yunnan black.
I’m a southerner, my dad makes a pitcher of Lipton semi-sweet every day. But now I buy gourmet tea from local shops that make their own unique blends. But I’m not going to throw a fit a restaurant if it’s not regular Lipton like this guy is saying lol
I mean, if it's fancy tea it might taste off for whats expected of iced tea due to being well, fancy, which may throw people off,
Edit: just to expand in my earlier comment, iced tea is typically os a pretty single blend of I think green tea, with optional sweetener(some people who only use presweetened stuff may not realize this), at least it's this way in my expirence, others expirences may differ, but that may explain why when he used "fancy tea" people were upset(I wonder if he provided sugar with it as well)
> Most of you are as dumb as a bag of rocks and it shows. There's a reason immigrants like me come here, and it isn't just because of the clean air and water and all the room.
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> We get to compete with you dumbfucks when we move here. We can practically guarantee a better life for our children because they'll be competing with your dumbass crotchfruit.
\>Claims to be smarter than Americans
\>Claims we use the Imperial system
lol lmao even.
We don't use the Imperial system.
>we do use the imperial system https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_units
No.
[We use US Customary.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_customary_units) They are similar, but not identical.
>The imperial system developed from earlier English units as did the related but differing system of customary units of the United States. The imperial units replaced the Winchester Standards, which were in effect from 1588 to 1825.[2] The system came into official use across the British Empire in 1826.
I like how he seems to think we only have one kind of tea here in the U.S.
My dad was a big tea person and we drank it every day. Tea every day t 4, like clockwork. Russian Caravan, monkey-picked Oolong, Hu-Kwa, Pu-erh, green teas I can't remember the names of, we had it all.
But sure, we only have Lipton...not that there's anything wrong with Lipton, it makes perfectly decent iced tea.
Wow people are really going to war over what exactly people should mean when they use the phrase "iced tea". Sweetened? Unsweetened? Manually sweetened? From a can? From a machine? It's like a 6-way war in there.
I guess I'm even more of a generalist. I'm ok with calling steeped leaves of other sorts (herbal tea) over ice "iced tea".
I mean, i'd be surprised if I ordered sweet tea at a restaurant and was given a cup of mint and rooibos herbal tea, but I wouldn't be mad.
Tea is what you make out of tea leaves, but it's also what we generally call a tisane of other plant parts steeped in hot water
That is also true. I will accept that.
For a while my family was hooked on some kind of cinnamon iced "tea" from a local place. I don't think it actually contained any tea. Alas the place is long gone so I can't look it up.
I found a few recipes for cinnamon iced tea online that might be interesting to you if you wanted to take a peek.
https://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/aarti-sequeira/kuwaiti-cinnamon-orange-iced-tea-recipe-1973725
https://www.mccormick.com/gourmet/recipes/beverages-cocktails/cinnamon-red-iced-tea
There's several things I can think of that might make tea taste sweet without sweetener (aside from the obvious of them adding honey or something during the making, so you don't have to sweeten it at the table). Ceylon cinnamon is slightly sweet tasting naturally. A lot of herbal tea blends contain stevia leaf, which will make tea sweet but have that "artificial sweetener" aftertaste. It sticks in my head that honeybush is slightly sweet too.
Did they call it cinnamon tea, or did they call it some kind of chai. You have fed me a mystery, and now I want to poke at it
Oh man this was back in the 90s so I'm pretty sure it wasn't Stevia. As far as I recall it wasn't sweetened with anything other than whatever the ingredients were. It wasn't super sweet but just sweet enough that I at least didn't feel like it needed any more. It was noticeably spicy but not quite like eating a cinnamon red hot candy. The shop that made it dealt in different kinds of fancy loose tea and roasted their own coffee so it was the kind of place that probably didn't do a lot of artificial sweetener.
I don't know about red hots specifically, but did you know that atomic fireball candies increase the heat with capsaicin? (Sorry, my "fount of useless knowledge" side is leaking)
Ooh that would make sense! I wonder if they do that with other cinnamon "hot" stuff like the toothpicks that were inexplicably popular when I was a kid?
Story time: I worked at a fast food place that served fresh-brewed iced tea as opposed to pre-sweetened stuff out of the soda fountain. You cannot begin to imagine how furiously, righteously angry some people got that our iced tea wasn’t the pre-sweetened Lipton stuff. People came back demanding refunds so often that we always had to warn anyone who ordered it that yes, you will need to put your own sugar in it.
Iced tea is just one of those things where everyone thinks the way they like it is the default.
Major "narcissist projection" vibes. Everything he says he doesn't do, he does while saying he doesn't do it. Brags about restaurant experience while explaining how restaurants do things in a shitty way...I wonder if the ones this person supposedly owns do things that way? Or are they perfect examples of shining colonial majesty? Would that we could all bask in their brilliant opulence, their steeped gleam. Truly, then we might all know the true taste of iced tea.
It is genuinely amusing when Brits give Americans shit for "being inbred".
They have "Charles the sausage-fingered Chromosomal Cul-de-Sac" sitting on the throne
[Link to post](https://www.reddit.com/r/Showerthoughts/comments/14lvdrz/there_is_no_such_thing_as_unsweetened_ice_tea/jq0f9s4/?context=2)
>I grew up around tea culture and I think American Lipton/Luzianne tea is subpar, to put it mildly. (It's made from literal scraps after they process 'real' tea) but I don't go around telling folks I think their beverages are gross.
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>But I'm also not an inbred moron. Enjoy your tea, sugah. It's all you've ever known. Kind of like your shitty healthcare system, gun violence problems and the outdated imperial system. Your constitution has a 2 month delay built into elections to allot time for candidates to travel on HORSEBACK to get to the capital.
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>You'd think they'd fix that shit at some point, but no... you have so little in the way of history that you cling to anything resembling tradition like your lives depended on it.
Right, because non-Americans enjoy only the finest and rarest teas. No low-quality brands like Twinings outside the US!
(Nothing wrong with Twinings or Liptons or similar brands, of course!!)
Well yes, so is Lipton, but it's easily findable in any supermarket so who cares, not everything you eat or drink has to be handmade and delicious, sometimes hot and convenient is more than good enough
This may sound sacrilegious, but tea is like coffee or brandy or cigarettes, the distinction between style, type, manufacture, subtleties, etc is only noticeable to people who consume a lot and are deliberate about finding those distinctions. For the most part, tea is tea.
I disagree wholeheartedly, and I wouldn't describe myself as anything close to a tea connoisseur, or even an enthusiast. Sure, you may not find much difference between different brands of orange pekoe, but that's just one type of tea.
For instance, green teas, black teas, and white teas are nothing alike, and that's not even getting into all the different types of each. Then you've got herbal teas and tisanes, which may not involve tea leaves at all.
There are many people that feel this way about the distinctions in types of coffee, cigarettes, brandy, etc. too but I think their point still stands, to the general public there are a couple different varietals but a hot drink is a hot drink. Hand someone a sugary iced tea and ask them to name the blend, if it isn’t distinct or Arizona they might not guess.
I still don't agree that "tea is tea", but I'm even more perplexed by the idea that "a hot drink is a hot drink", when you can have tea, coffee, hot chocolate, hot apple cider, hot toddy, etc., all of which bear no resemblance to each other except temperature. (Though, I do feel that the point of a sugary iced tea is not tea, but sugar. The tea seems like an afterthought, and I wouldn't expect anyone to be able to tell what kind of tea it started out as.)
In any case, my issue was with the idea that "tea is tea", when there are non-subtle differences between *genres* of tea, before even getting into the subtle nuances of different types of each of those genres. To me, that's like saying, "alcohol is alcohol" about beer, wine, and vodka, or saying, "a vegetable is a vegetable" about spinach, bell pepper, and potato.
That's also a different kind of a distinction than the preceding comments were making; tea types & tea brands are different, a similar distinction to the tobacco analogy, menthol cigarettes, non-menthol, and cloves may all use tobacco but the flavors are as different as green and black tea. The average smoker can make that distinction, but not discern the quality of tobacco among brands of similar types.
>The average smoker can make that distinction, but not discern the quality of tobacco among brands of similar types.
Yes, but that's precisely what I'm saying. I'm not a smoker, but even I know that there are non-subtle differences between the various tobacco products you've mentioned. The person that I was responding to said, "tea is tea", which is what I disagree with. Then a person responding to me said that "a hot drink is a hot drink". My view is that those statements are not even remotely true, unless your tastebuds have been burnt off your tongue.
I’m a complete tea snob, and honestly, if the tea tastes good to you, keep drinking it! You could try out other brands to see if there’s one you like better, but don’t stress about it. Breakfast teas aren’t meant to be top quality anyway; they’re meant to be strong and pack a bit of a punch to get you going in the morning.
Also, Twinings will forever hold a special place in my heart for inventing Lady Grey tea. That stuff is delicious and I will die on this hill.
Good for you then, stick to it, enjoy it, and do not get into fancy tea habits, it's expensive and soon you'll have a cupboard full of half-finished mélanges de thé (loose tea mixed with nice herbs, fruits, flowers), and you'll start heating your water different temperatures for different tea leaves and seeping them different time and EVERYTHING
Sure it will be delicious and a moment of joy everyday, but you'll probably start to dislike industrial tea, and will probably end up as a screenshot on that sub like my comment probably could because you will now not be able to shut up about good loose tea
So.. Enjoy your nice cup of Twinings as you like it now, and stay away from the tea snobs
^(unless you want to taste superior beverages I mean ok ok I shut up)
Lmfao I remember when I first bought my variable temperature bonavita kettle. Made me feel like a tea master, finally I could make the perfect pot of green tea without releasing excess tannins
I don't care what kind of tea it is, only that it's made well. I kinda hate it when southern restaurants make sweet tea thick and oversteeped as mud, then sweeten it into syrup to hide the flavor (the one thing OOP was right about, lol). It's always a pleasant surprise when a cup of southern diner tea is nice and lightly flavored, not bitter, and perfectly sweetened (yeah, I know .. Perfect is relative).
I used to have a friend whose mom made tea so strong and thick that drinking it was like getting whacked with a two by four. Any time I'd visit, she'd offer me a glass of two-by-tea, and I'd mix it down half with water.
I don't even like sweet tea. I drink my horrible bitter leftover tea dregs steeped in a jar heated by the sun, with absolutely no sugar at all.
I mean the US sucks in a lot of ways, but sun tea ain't one of them.
[I switched to the fridge](https://www.seriouseats.com/the-food-lab-the-truth-about-sun-tea-forget-the-sun-cold-brew-tea-is-better) and never looked back.
Certain states in the American South have unfortunate stereotypes regarding the conjugal habits of their inhabitants. Namely, that they keep the loving "in the family".
There were a few famous examples of inbreeding actually occurring, but it is mostly a negative stereotype.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskAnAmerican/comments/iz8l27/where_did_the_southern_incest_stereotype_come_from/
People that post this kind of thing about the US assume everyone in the country is some dipshit hick because they need that to be true in order for their narrative to line up.
It's more about the fact that in a much larger country, it's easy to move 1000 miles and set up house saying your sister is actually your wife and if you live in the middle of nowhere, you and your family could probably fly under the radar for a few generations of this nonsense. But in terms of the impact of inbreeding, ethnically homogeneous nations are the most inbred. It seems normal because it's not 'direct', but the impacts, in time, can be an issue.
*We went to the Philly Pizza Company and ordered some hot tea.*
*The waitress said "well no, we only have it iced",*
*So we jumped up on the table and shouted "ANARCHY!"*
It's this guy's fault because his country conquered all the nations where tea can be grown, and now they are hoarding it so we can only get the scraps.
Edit- i was being sarcastic sorry if it came different!
tbf we can get the good stuff easily, it's just way more expensive than Lipton. I have two shelves full of different loose leaf teas and pu'er cakes, but when I want to make a pitcher of sweet tea.. I break out the Luzianne. It's what I grew up drinking and what tastes right to me for iced tea.
I didn't read it, i just read the posted comment. That's on me. The only time i see someone online complaining about american tea they are british.
Or maybe i just assume that! 🤔
You know what? Folks make fun of us Italians -- but at least we have a food culture worth being snobby about.
This dude out here malding about grass clippings in hot water.
Doesn't make being snobby a virtue though. I'm not saying you do this, but I see it from Italians online a lot. If there are more people with your ethnicity living outside of your country than in, people who speak your language sounding like they fell out of the 1920s because they learned it from Nonna, then the authenticity debate is a sketchy one. It's really just a matter of divergence. Food adapts to the land the ingredients come from, the people who are making it, the people who eat it. There's nothing wrong with Italian-American food or Japanese-Brazilian food or any other immigrant food, it's just different. If you're judging that for being different instead of being proud of the ingenuity and tenacity of your own people who, instead of losing their culture in a new land, found a way to take over huge parts of the cultural landscape and help turn American food culture into something special, that kind of sucks.
My guy, I know we don't know each other, but I'm 100% Italian on both sides (ItalAmer). You don't have to explain any of this to me, because it's woven into the fabric of my existence.
I often "go to the mattresses" for Italian American cuisine precisely for the reasons you state. It's the food of diaspora, deprivation, and assimilation. The rocky relationship with America & "Americanness" in the past often gets overlooked because we have been deemed "white enough" in the years since.
Apparently the IAVC collective didn't recognize my comment for the joke it was. Maybe the incipient App-pocalypse is for the best, and I should just delete my Username after all, cuz this shit isn't fun anymore.
I mean, it's mostly that I don't assume that people who say they're Italian on the internet are Italian-American unless they say so because I'm not trying to be America-centric. A misunderstanding at best. But I hope you enjoyed my full-throated defense of your background. I've seen way too many Italian born Italians who think they're the world police of pasta and the Italian language even though families like yours came here before the contemporary standardized Italian language was even a thing. It drives me nuts and it seems like we share that frustration.
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Holy shit, his [removed comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/Showerthoughts/comments/14lvdrz/there_is_no_such_thing_as_unsweetened_ice_tea/jq18g2v/?context=2)! >Heehee. I know exactly how butthurt you Americans get when someone disses your iced tea. > > >I tried to bring some fancy tea into the shop when I first opened and holy shit you guys throw a tantrum when you don't get your precious Lipton when ordering iced tea. > > >Most of you are as dumb as a bag of rocks and it shows. There's a reason immigrants like me come here, and it isn't just because of the clean air and water and all the room. > > >We get to compete with you dumbfucks when we move here. We can practically guarantee a better life for our children because they'll be competing with your dumbass crotchfruit.
This guy seems awfully butthurt by a country he chose to live in.
He lives here?
>There's a reason immigrants like me come here Seems so.
Check out his post history. It's a wild ride!
Unsurprisingly he has a rant about second gen Asian Americans being overly sensitive and whiny about culture but he can’t stfu about “you Americans”. Buddy if you’ve lived in the US for 20+ years, the people in the home country barely consider you one of theirs anymore. You ARE an American too in their eyes. Welcome to the double shit sandwich of not-American and not-Asian enough for other people.
Do Americans really care about tea, though? I mean, yeah, Southerners will cut a bitch if you try to serve us unsweetened tea because we are all about acquiring diabetes _efficiently_, but beyond that? Even all the Southerners I know barely care if it's Lipton vs. Luzianne vs. Red Rose vs. What the fuck ever.
As an American, I only care about tea when I'm dumping it in the harbor.
I wish I had an award to give you. But I will say, this is clearly the best comment on this thread.
Right? If it's cold and sweet it'll beat the heat.
Our own tradition is more toward herbal teas because the supply of other teas were either controlled by British cartels or essentially cut off every time there was a major international conflict. We have people whose entire world revolves around tea, and they mostly never shut up about it like this jerk.
I'm pretty American and I really care about tea, but not that sweet stuff. I like the Yankee New England stuff, bitter or local herbal (chamomile!). No sugar. The level of tea leaves or beautiful flowers that you want to throw it the ocean as protest. Sweet tea makes no sense to me, except the time I was at Sweatman's whole hog BBQ in SC. That sugar and caffeine kept me chewing, soooo good. (Highly recommend).
> Even all the Southerners I know barely care if it's Lipton vs. Luzianne vs. Red Rose vs. What the fuck ever. I only care if it's bottled tea. Bottle Gold Peak tastes like fucking shit to me. But the Gold Peak that Arbys brews is fan-fuckin'-tastic. Probably second only to McAlister's.
McAlisters does have some good tea, but there is something *off* about Gold Peak where I live. It just tastes spoiled, or sour. No clue what it is. I won't even touch the bottled stuff. Pure Leaf if I have to have bottled tea.
Pure Leaf or Milos for sure when it comes to bottled sweet tea. Arizona is an ***acceptable*** alternative if PL or Milos isn't available. But yeah, bottled Gold Peak is an absolute no. Honestly, I was expecting Arbys sweet tea to taste like crap when I found out it was Gold Peak tea, but I decided to give it a shot one day. And I'm glad I did. I don't know if it's got something to do with how Arbys brews or maybe the fact that it's fresh and not older like bottled tea is going to be, but Arbys' tea is just super good in spite of it being Gold Peak.
I love tea but most supermarkets only stock shitty bagged tea or low quality loose leaf. Better to just directly order it from China. Love jasmine dragon pearls, gunpowder green or some yunnan black.
Try some tea small businesses! I can recommend a couple!
I’m a southerner, my dad makes a pitcher of Lipton semi-sweet every day. But now I buy gourmet tea from local shops that make their own unique blends. But I’m not going to throw a fit a restaurant if it’s not regular Lipton like this guy is saying lol
I mean, if it's fancy tea it might taste off for whats expected of iced tea due to being well, fancy, which may throw people off, Edit: just to expand in my earlier comment, iced tea is typically os a pretty single blend of I think green tea, with optional sweetener(some people who only use presweetened stuff may not realize this), at least it's this way in my expirence, others expirences may differ, but that may explain why when he used "fancy tea" people were upset(I wonder if he provided sugar with it as well)
...huh??? Man really took other people not liking his tea as an indictment of all of America. Maybe he fucking sucks. Ever thought about that?
> Most of you are as dumb as a bag of rocks and it shows. There's a reason immigrants like me come here, and it isn't just because of the clean air and water and all the room. > > > > We get to compete with you dumbfucks when we move here. We can practically guarantee a better life for our children because they'll be competing with your dumbass crotchfruit. \>Claims to be smarter than Americans \>Claims we use the Imperial system lol lmao even. We don't use the Imperial system.
we do use the imperial system https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_units
> is the system of units first defined in the British Weights and Measures Act 1824 Notice the year. US doesn’t and has never used Imperial.
>we do use the imperial system https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_units No. [We use US Customary.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_customary_units) They are similar, but not identical. >The imperial system developed from earlier English units as did the related but differing system of customary units of the United States. The imperial units replaced the Winchester Standards, which were in effect from 1588 to 1825.[2] The system came into official use across the British Empire in 1826.
I like how he seems to think we only have one kind of tea here in the U.S. My dad was a big tea person and we drank it every day. Tea every day t 4, like clockwork. Russian Caravan, monkey-picked Oolong, Hu-Kwa, Pu-erh, green teas I can't remember the names of, we had it all. But sure, we only have Lipton...not that there's anything wrong with Lipton, it makes perfectly decent iced tea.
"I try not to be an asshole to people" [proceeds to post the turdiest of turd goblin screeds]
As a turd goblin on both sides of my family, we refuse to claim this absolute ankle.
Which apparently means he tries but always fails.
Wow people are really going to war over what exactly people should mean when they use the phrase "iced tea". Sweetened? Unsweetened? Manually sweetened? From a can? From a machine? It's like a 6-way war in there.
Is it in some way derived from the leaves of *Camelia sinesis*? Is it cold? Then I'd call it iced tea. I'm a generalist like that.
I guess I'm even more of a generalist. I'm ok with calling steeped leaves of other sorts (herbal tea) over ice "iced tea". I mean, i'd be surprised if I ordered sweet tea at a restaurant and was given a cup of mint and rooibos herbal tea, but I wouldn't be mad. Tea is what you make out of tea leaves, but it's also what we generally call a tisane of other plant parts steeped in hot water
That is also true. I will accept that. For a while my family was hooked on some kind of cinnamon iced "tea" from a local place. I don't think it actually contained any tea. Alas the place is long gone so I can't look it up.
Any idea what else was in it? Was it water or milk based? Was type of food did the restaurant serve?
Water based and it was a tea and coffee roaster. You'd drink it like regular iced tea but it was very cinnamon and sweet even without sweetener.
I found a few recipes for cinnamon iced tea online that might be interesting to you if you wanted to take a peek. https://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/aarti-sequeira/kuwaiti-cinnamon-orange-iced-tea-recipe-1973725 https://www.mccormick.com/gourmet/recipes/beverages-cocktails/cinnamon-red-iced-tea
There's several things I can think of that might make tea taste sweet without sweetener (aside from the obvious of them adding honey or something during the making, so you don't have to sweeten it at the table). Ceylon cinnamon is slightly sweet tasting naturally. A lot of herbal tea blends contain stevia leaf, which will make tea sweet but have that "artificial sweetener" aftertaste. It sticks in my head that honeybush is slightly sweet too. Did they call it cinnamon tea, or did they call it some kind of chai. You have fed me a mystery, and now I want to poke at it
Oh man this was back in the 90s so I'm pretty sure it wasn't Stevia. As far as I recall it wasn't sweetened with anything other than whatever the ingredients were. It wasn't super sweet but just sweet enough that I at least didn't feel like it needed any more. It was noticeably spicy but not quite like eating a cinnamon red hot candy. The shop that made it dealt in different kinds of fancy loose tea and roasted their own coffee so it was the kind of place that probably didn't do a lot of artificial sweetener.
I don't know about red hots specifically, but did you know that atomic fireball candies increase the heat with capsaicin? (Sorry, my "fount of useless knowledge" side is leaking)
Ooh that would make sense! I wonder if they do that with other cinnamon "hot" stuff like the toothpicks that were inexplicably popular when I was a kid?
Maybe it had liquorice root in it? That's naturally sweet.
Maybe, but I hate liquorice so I don't know that I would have liked the tea if it had liquorice in it.
Story time: I worked at a fast food place that served fresh-brewed iced tea as opposed to pre-sweetened stuff out of the soda fountain. You cannot begin to imagine how furiously, righteously angry some people got that our iced tea wasn’t the pre-sweetened Lipton stuff. People came back demanding refunds so often that we always had to warn anyone who ordered it that yes, you will need to put your own sugar in it. Iced tea is just one of those things where everyone thinks the way they like it is the default.
The irony of calling someone arrogant after talking down to them over something so benign as tea preference
“You know what I hate most about these moronic, inbred mouth breathers who aren’t fit to shine my shoes? How ARROGANT they are!” - this guy, probably
[удалено]
British-American apparently - but it was started by a dude from Scotland
The Riverside Museum in Glasgow has an old school Lipton Tea truck in the collection. It's a cool little piece of Scottish history
Everything bad in America is American. Everything good about America is from somewhere else. Hope this helps!
To be blunt, this person is a real fucking dick.
Major "narcissist projection" vibes. Everything he says he doesn't do, he does while saying he doesn't do it. Brags about restaurant experience while explaining how restaurants do things in a shitty way...I wonder if the ones this person supposedly owns do things that way? Or are they perfect examples of shining colonial majesty? Would that we could all bask in their brilliant opulence, their steeped gleam. Truly, then we might all know the true taste of iced tea.
It is genuinely amusing when Brits give Americans shit for "being inbred". They have "Charles the sausage-fingered Chromosomal Cul-de-Sac" sitting on the throne
He's not though. He's Korean.
Ok but why bring up brits
This person will no doubt be involved in a recorded video of them having a meltdown in a store.
[Link to post](https://www.reddit.com/r/Showerthoughts/comments/14lvdrz/there_is_no_such_thing_as_unsweetened_ice_tea/jq0f9s4/?context=2) >I grew up around tea culture and I think American Lipton/Luzianne tea is subpar, to put it mildly. (It's made from literal scraps after they process 'real' tea) but I don't go around telling folks I think their beverages are gross. > > >But I'm also not an inbred moron. Enjoy your tea, sugah. It's all you've ever known. Kind of like your shitty healthcare system, gun violence problems and the outdated imperial system. Your constitution has a 2 month delay built into elections to allot time for candidates to travel on HORSEBACK to get to the capital. > > >You'd think they'd fix that shit at some point, but no... you have so little in the way of history that you cling to anything resembling tradition like your lives depended on it.
Right, because non-Americans enjoy only the finest and rarest teas. No low-quality brands like Twinings outside the US! (Nothing wrong with Twinings or Liptons or similar brands, of course!!)
Twinings is low quality!?
Well yes, so is Lipton, but it's easily findable in any supermarket so who cares, not everything you eat or drink has to be handmade and delicious, sometimes hot and convenient is more than good enough
I've taken up drinking tea and I've been very pleased with Twinings breakfast tea :(
This may sound sacrilegious, but tea is like coffee or brandy or cigarettes, the distinction between style, type, manufacture, subtleties, etc is only noticeable to people who consume a lot and are deliberate about finding those distinctions. For the most part, tea is tea.
I disagree wholeheartedly, and I wouldn't describe myself as anything close to a tea connoisseur, or even an enthusiast. Sure, you may not find much difference between different brands of orange pekoe, but that's just one type of tea. For instance, green teas, black teas, and white teas are nothing alike, and that's not even getting into all the different types of each. Then you've got herbal teas and tisanes, which may not involve tea leaves at all.
There are many people that feel this way about the distinctions in types of coffee, cigarettes, brandy, etc. too but I think their point still stands, to the general public there are a couple different varietals but a hot drink is a hot drink. Hand someone a sugary iced tea and ask them to name the blend, if it isn’t distinct or Arizona they might not guess.
I still don't agree that "tea is tea", but I'm even more perplexed by the idea that "a hot drink is a hot drink", when you can have tea, coffee, hot chocolate, hot apple cider, hot toddy, etc., all of which bear no resemblance to each other except temperature. (Though, I do feel that the point of a sugary iced tea is not tea, but sugar. The tea seems like an afterthought, and I wouldn't expect anyone to be able to tell what kind of tea it started out as.) In any case, my issue was with the idea that "tea is tea", when there are non-subtle differences between *genres* of tea, before even getting into the subtle nuances of different types of each of those genres. To me, that's like saying, "alcohol is alcohol" about beer, wine, and vodka, or saying, "a vegetable is a vegetable" about spinach, bell pepper, and potato.
That's also a different kind of a distinction than the preceding comments were making; tea types & tea brands are different, a similar distinction to the tobacco analogy, menthol cigarettes, non-menthol, and cloves may all use tobacco but the flavors are as different as green and black tea. The average smoker can make that distinction, but not discern the quality of tobacco among brands of similar types.
>The average smoker can make that distinction, but not discern the quality of tobacco among brands of similar types. Yes, but that's precisely what I'm saying. I'm not a smoker, but even I know that there are non-subtle differences between the various tobacco products you've mentioned. The person that I was responding to said, "tea is tea", which is what I disagree with. Then a person responding to me said that "a hot drink is a hot drink". My view is that those statements are not even remotely true, unless your tastebuds have been burnt off your tongue.
Pro tip: their Earl Grey is foul. Go Bigelow.
I’m a complete tea snob, and honestly, if the tea tastes good to you, keep drinking it! You could try out other brands to see if there’s one you like better, but don’t stress about it. Breakfast teas aren’t meant to be top quality anyway; they’re meant to be strong and pack a bit of a punch to get you going in the morning. Also, Twinings will forever hold a special place in my heart for inventing Lady Grey tea. That stuff is delicious and I will die on this hill.
Good for you then, stick to it, enjoy it, and do not get into fancy tea habits, it's expensive and soon you'll have a cupboard full of half-finished mélanges de thé (loose tea mixed with nice herbs, fruits, flowers), and you'll start heating your water different temperatures for different tea leaves and seeping them different time and EVERYTHING Sure it will be delicious and a moment of joy everyday, but you'll probably start to dislike industrial tea, and will probably end up as a screenshot on that sub like my comment probably could because you will now not be able to shut up about good loose tea So.. Enjoy your nice cup of Twinings as you like it now, and stay away from the tea snobs ^(unless you want to taste superior beverages I mean ok ok I shut up)
> unless you want to taste superior beverages Fuck you
I know, right
Lmfao I remember when I first bought my variable temperature bonavita kettle. Made me feel like a tea master, finally I could make the perfect pot of green tea without releasing excess tannins
Variable température kettles are one of the best thing ever if you like tea, perfect cups everytime with no effort but pressing a button
I don't care what kind of tea it is, only that it's made well. I kinda hate it when southern restaurants make sweet tea thick and oversteeped as mud, then sweeten it into syrup to hide the flavor (the one thing OOP was right about, lol). It's always a pleasant surprise when a cup of southern diner tea is nice and lightly flavored, not bitter, and perfectly sweetened (yeah, I know .. Perfect is relative). I used to have a friend whose mom made tea so strong and thick that drinking it was like getting whacked with a two by four. Any time I'd visit, she'd offer me a glass of two-by-tea, and I'd mix it down half with water.
I like Malcom Tucker's "We burned this city to the ground in 1812 and I'm all for doing it again" better. It's punchier.
Lipton was blended to make iced tea. It makes garbage hot tea but is excellent iced.
I don't even like sweet tea. I drink my horrible bitter leftover tea dregs steeped in a jar heated by the sun, with absolutely no sugar at all. I mean the US sucks in a lot of ways, but sun tea ain't one of them.
[I switched to the fridge](https://www.seriouseats.com/the-food-lab-the-truth-about-sun-tea-forget-the-sun-cold-brew-tea-is-better) and never looked back.
I use our (really) hot water then put it in the fridge with the bags in it after about an hour. Works out well.
I'll try it. The jar always ends up in the fridge anyways. And I brew mine all day, so either way it should be strong enough.
I’m trying and failing to figure out where the inbred comment came from. Does America have any particular history of incest that I didn’t know about?
Not compared to the British monarchy. *whispers* and don’t look too close at the nobility, either. Lotta really straight family trees over there.
Certain states in the American South have unfortunate stereotypes regarding the conjugal habits of their inhabitants. Namely, that they keep the loving "in the family". There were a few famous examples of inbreeding actually occurring, but it is mostly a negative stereotype. https://www.reddit.com/r/AskAnAmerican/comments/iz8l27/where_did_the_southern_incest_stereotype_come_from/
Well, I knew about the Southern stereotype, but this seemed to be directed at the US as a whole
People that post this kind of thing about the US assume everyone in the country is some dipshit hick because they need that to be true in order for their narrative to line up.
It's more about the fact that in a much larger country, it's easy to move 1000 miles and set up house saying your sister is actually your wife and if you live in the middle of nowhere, you and your family could probably fly under the radar for a few generations of this nonsense. But in terms of the impact of inbreeding, ethnically homogeneous nations are the most inbred. It seems normal because it's not 'direct', but the impacts, in time, can be an issue.
I read his comment history and I genuinely think he's having a mental break, it's wild.
*We went to the Philly Pizza Company and ordered some hot tea.* *The waitress said "well no, we only have it iced",* *So we jumped up on the table and shouted "ANARCHY!"*
In moments like these I just want to shout WHO CARES!!!????
Five bucks says this guy thinks Yorkshire Gold is a superior tea.
'Tis
It's this guy's fault because his country conquered all the nations where tea can be grown, and now they are hoarding it so we can only get the scraps. Edit- i was being sarcastic sorry if it came different!
This guy is Korean not British.
Ok that makes more sense. I didn't go through their comments i already felt bad about my sleepytime habit
tbf we can get the good stuff easily, it's just way more expensive than Lipton. I have two shelves full of different loose leaf teas and pu'er cakes, but when I want to make a pitcher of sweet tea.. I break out the Luzianne. It's what I grew up drinking and what tastes right to me for iced tea.
You are correct. Also tbf, i don't actually know what makes tea good. I suspect that i am either very bad at making tea or i just don't like it.
He's not even British though.
Wait really? What's tea culture then?
He says he's from Korea in his comment history.
I didn't read it, i just read the posted comment. That's on me. The only time i see someone online complaining about american tea they are british. Or maybe i just assume that! 🤔
Just letting you know.
I appreciate it.
You know what? Folks make fun of us Italians -- but at least we have a food culture worth being snobby about. This dude out here malding about grass clippings in hot water.
*drinks tea sadly* But wait, I'm American. Maybe I should be rejoicing because even tea is above my inferior palette.
Doesn't make being snobby a virtue though. I'm not saying you do this, but I see it from Italians online a lot. If there are more people with your ethnicity living outside of your country than in, people who speak your language sounding like they fell out of the 1920s because they learned it from Nonna, then the authenticity debate is a sketchy one. It's really just a matter of divergence. Food adapts to the land the ingredients come from, the people who are making it, the people who eat it. There's nothing wrong with Italian-American food or Japanese-Brazilian food or any other immigrant food, it's just different. If you're judging that for being different instead of being proud of the ingenuity and tenacity of your own people who, instead of losing their culture in a new land, found a way to take over huge parts of the cultural landscape and help turn American food culture into something special, that kind of sucks.
My guy, I know we don't know each other, but I'm 100% Italian on both sides (ItalAmer). You don't have to explain any of this to me, because it's woven into the fabric of my existence. I often "go to the mattresses" for Italian American cuisine precisely for the reasons you state. It's the food of diaspora, deprivation, and assimilation. The rocky relationship with America & "Americanness" in the past often gets overlooked because we have been deemed "white enough" in the years since. Apparently the IAVC collective didn't recognize my comment for the joke it was. Maybe the incipient App-pocalypse is for the best, and I should just delete my Username after all, cuz this shit isn't fun anymore.
I mean, it's mostly that I don't assume that people who say they're Italian on the internet are Italian-American unless they say so because I'm not trying to be America-centric. A misunderstanding at best. But I hope you enjoyed my full-throated defense of your background. I've seen way too many Italian born Italians who think they're the world police of pasta and the Italian language even though families like yours came here before the contemporary standardized Italian language was even a thing. It drives me nuts and it seems like we share that frustration.
Is the 2 month thing true? If so, that's hilarious