Iced tea, like the tea bag, is another marvel of American ingenuity! It’s the quintessential summer drink, right next to lemonade and Americans drink 110 million cups of it each day.
Iced tea was invented at the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis when Richard Blechynden, a merchant of Indian tea, faced the dubious task of selling hot tea to crowds sweltering in the summer heat. In desperation, he poured his tea over ice and the cool, copper-colored beverage was an instant sensation. That was the same year the a fellow American, Thomas Sullivan, invented the tea bag.
Everyone the world over now has their own variation of the traditional iced tea. Most restaurants serve Lipton Iced Tea, places like the Cheesecake Factory serve Tropical brand Passion Fruit Iced Tea, and people in the south serve sweet tea. Go to a Hong Kong style Café or Japanese café and you get iced tea with a little pitcher of syrup, a variation of southern sweet tea. In Morocco, iced tea gets served with mint leaves on top.
At the gas station, you can find several iced tea labels. There’s Snapple, made from the best stuff along with the most artificial-tasting chemicals on earth, there’s Sobe, which comes with natural “additives,” like Kava Kava and Guarana, and then there’s my favorite: real brewed Lipton Iced Tea that comes in the bottle. Sweetened, No Lemon. It’s the closest thing to sweet tea that’s available at the gas station.
If you want to make it at home. Any kind of tea will work, although Lipton now has this new invention of the cold-brew iced tea. Just add cold water and you get instant iced tea! It’s not very good, though, so brewing hot tea with sugar then icing it is still the best way to do it yourself.