DEL.ICIO.USAfter Snapple boom, can mass-produced beverage do region's favorite brew justice?
For the Journal-Constitution
Published on: 09/20/07
"We don't have pre-sweetened tea," says Lydia Campbell, a weekday lunch waitress at Watershed restaurant in Decatur, where chef Scott Peacock and his fellow cooks pay honest homage to traditional Southern cookery. No apology follows. No promise to double back bearing one of those tabletop carousels, stacked with Splenda packets and Dixie Crystals pouches.
Instead, when Campbell returns with a beaded tumbler — chunked with ice, brimming with umber tea — she carries a chilled pitcher on the tray alongside. The pitcher is diminutive and elegant, a cut-glass heirloom in the making. A clear viscous liquid sloshes within. "We keep simple syrup in the refrigerator, just in case," says Campbell, her eyes bright, her smile sly. "Some people want their tea sweeter than others. Some people want a hint of sugar. This way you get what you want."
 LOUIE FAVORITE/AJC Staff | ||
| 'We make the tea your grandmother made,' says Jay Evers, vice president of Milo's Tea, displaying some of its branding. Milo's isn't made from a powdered mix; it contains water, sugar and custom-blended teas. | ||
 Louie Favorite/Staff | ||
| Some restaurants offer unsweetened iced tea and provide patrons with a simple syrup. | ||
 Louie Favorite/Staff | ||
| At Bottega in Birmingham, April Sandlin brings out a tall glass of iced tea accompanied by a pitcher of mint-infused simple syrup. It's the same combination diners find at Frank Stitt's Highland Bar and Grill, its sister restaurant. | ||
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Responses to this sweetening method are polarizing: Depending on your perspective, Watershed offers the ultimate sweet tea experience. Or it peddles an untenable compromise. The latter camp is more vocal, advocating that among Southerners, the availability of pre-sweetened tea serves as a kind of culinary-cultural Global Positioning System, an indicator of where we are and, yes, who we are.
As in, we live in a land demarcated by Mason and Dixon. A land where brother fought brother over the vexing issue of slavery. A land where requests for sweet tea are honored with aplomb, which is to say, without simple syrup rigmarole.
The story of our regional love affair with iced and sweetened tea is, of course, more complicated than hyperbolic Southerners would have it.
It's a marker of regional identity, still served by rote at meat-and-three cafes. It's still the gather-around-the-table drink for Sunday afternoon re-enactments of farmhand feasts past. But sweet tea drinkers are no longer a regional sect. If they ever were. The rest of the nation is catching up.
The difference nowadays is the method of delivering tea to thirsty drinkers. In the South, beehived waitresses, double-fisting pitchers of sweet tea, still bob and weave through lunchtime throngs, pouring endless refills as they go. And half-gallon containers of home-brewed tea are, no matter the season, still front-and-center in well-stocked Southern refrigerators.
But just as wallop-and-bake refrigerator case biscuits are omnipresent and boxes of colonel-cooked fried chicken are no longer the source of family reunion scandal, bottles and cans of iced and sweetened tea are gaining in popularity. Gallon jugs, too.
Call it the post-Snapple boom. Argue that enough time has passed since we first tasted Nestea that prejudices against powdered tea mixes have faded, and grudges against all manner of commercially manufactured tea drinks have lapsed.
No matter. Refrigerated tea is, in the words of the wonks who monitor grocery and convenience store sales, the "juggernaut of the beverage business."
Statistics justify the hype. In 2006, sales of ready-to-drink tea, in cans and bottles, grew faster than soft drinks, fruit drinks or waters, with month-to-month comparisons showing sales spikes as high as 30 percent.
It's simple: water, sugar, tea
"We're threatening chicken," says Jay Evers, vice president of Milo's Tea, a Bessemer, Ala.-based business that brews and bottles 80,000 gallons a day. Evers, a former fraternity brother at Auburn University who still broadcasts a kind of boyish optimism, is joking about the chicken.
But only a little. Sweetened tea products are proving so popular, says Evers, that in select grocery stores, managers are cutting back on breasts and drumsticks, opting instead to stock refrigerator cases with higher-grossing 12-ouncers of sweet, unsweetened and Splenda-sweetened teas.
Unlike Nestea, Milo's isn't made from a powdered mix. Unlike teas from Arizona Beverages — a New York-based company that sells so-called Southern Style Sweet Tea in tallboy cans blazoned with a Tara-inspired moonlight and magnolias facade — no high fructose corn syrup lurks within. No citric acid or so-called natural flavors, either.
Water, sugar and custom-blended teas. That, according to the Milo's label, is the sum total of ingredients. No preservatives, either, the stuff that Evers dismissively calls "insurance in a bottle." No ingredients you would be hard-pressed to find in your own cupboard.
"We make the tea your grandmother made," says Evers, walking through the plant, a stucco warehouse tucked into a second-tier industrial park. He passes steeping kettles and fill lines, bound for the closure line where each expiration- date-stamped jug is capped.
That expiration date defines the difference sold by Milo's. Home-brewed tea usually goes flat in a few days. Milo's, on the other hand, gets 25 days of refrigerated shelf life from its product. That shelf life — garnered through proprietary brewing and chilling methods — is what has allowed the company to expand, partnering with regional dairies to distribute tea products via refrigerated trucks to portions of nine Southern states, stretching as far west as Louisiana, as far north as Virginia.
Jay Evers can tell you that the future of Milo's is bright. He brags that he's "hit the sweet spot," that he's selling to Atlanta-area Wal-Mart and Whole Foods alike, breaching the class divide with a product that everyone claims as their own.
Evers can cite statistics to track America's growing devotion to iced and sweetened tea. He knows the caffeine load of a 12-ounce bottle. Evers can speak New Age-speak. He knows his polyphenols from his anti-oxidants. And he knows enough to make passing references to the health-giving properties of tea, without promising any benefits.
He also knows when to pull up short. "We're not selling an elixir," he says. "There is no magic spring where this stuff burbles up. We're selling tea. Really good tea. ... I tell people, 'Hey, if you don't like our tea, you can call me a bad name.' "
It stands to reason that, with all the nation clamoring for iced tea drinks, a potential category killer product would emerge from the South. What surprises, for those new to Milo's, is that this ueber-traditional beverage does not have its beginnings in a family heirloom recipe.
Instead, Milo's way with sweet tea was honed at a burger joint, a fast-food walk-up in downtown Birmingham founded in 1946 by recently furloughed serviceman Milo Carlton. (Today, a separate management group owns and operates a small chain of Milo's restaurants, but all of the tea, even for those locations, is brewed in Bessemer.)
"Milo saw the possibilities," says Evers.
"He figured out that making his own tea would be cheaper than buying Coke," adds Ronnie Carlton, Milo's son, who directs the family tea business. "Dad started out at the stove with a pot, like anyone would at home. He bought his tea bags from the grocery store. His sugar, too. But his volume kept going higher. By the late 1940s he was buying so much sugar that the [Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms] came to check up on him. They figured anybody using that much sugar must be making moonshine."
The South boasts a long history of brewing and drinking iced and sweetened tea. Damon Lee Fowler, author of "Classical Southern Cooking," cites an entry from "Housekeeping in Old Virginia," published in 1879, as the oldest printed recipe. What's more, Fowler believes that tea punches, sweetened with sugar and spiked with wine, have been around since at least the 1830s. And he says those punches are precursors to the sweet teas of today.
But a dive into a newspaper morgue proves that a devotion to iced and sweetened tea is not restricted to the South. "Iced tea is becoming very popular," announces the Janesville Gazette of Wisconsin, in an August 1868 article. "It is a beverage easily prepared, costs little, does not intoxicate, and can be taken at any hour. Sweeten your hot tea to suit your taste; then pour it, spoonful by spoonful, into a tumbler filled with ice."
Oddly enough, the foundations of our regional devotion to sweet tea are in that Wisconsin dispatch. Take note of the technique and you'll recognize the Southern way of sweetening tea while it's still hot, the idea being that sugar dissolves more readily when stirred into a just-off-the-boil liquid.
Frugality plays a part, too. For much of the South's post-bellum history, we have been poorer than the rest of the nation. So cheap and easy beverages appealed.
For centuries tea was exotic and expensive, the product of faraway lands. But by the mid-1800s, supply had caught up with demand. Green tea from China fell out of favor. Black tea from India flooded the market at bargain-basement prices. Concurrently or thereabouts, the price of sugar began dropping. For Southerners, who have traditionally raised the majority of the nation's cane crop, the conjunction of ingredients seemed preordained.
Speaking of religion, tea owes a debt to drunkenness. And its inverse, sobriety. In the South, where a conservative brand of Christianity predominates, nonalcoholic beverage alternatives have long been clergy favorites. (Those same influences, along with deft and pervasive marketing schemes, and the promise of caffeine payoffs, also drove regional soft drink consumption.)
In the years leading up to the 1920 enactment of Prohibition, iced and sugared tea gained popularity throughout the region. "The best beverage that Nature has given mankind so far is tea," read a 1919 letter to the editor of the Literary Digest. "[It's] the cup that cheers but does not inebriate."
Readily available ice was the final piece of the puzzle. During the late 1920s and early 1930s, electric refrigerator-freezers became working-class appliances. In the heat-drenched South, consumers converted. In the bargain, they got ice trays.
"The [Tennessee Valley Authority] and rural electrification made it possible for the farm family to use this truly great convenience," wrote Joe Gray Taylor in "Eating, Drinking and Visiting in the South." "It was probably more appreciated for the ice cubes it provided for tea than for any of its other services."
Thirst-quencher for all
All was ready. All was right. Tea was a cheap and democratic beverage, unsullied by alcohol. It was easily made. Easily chilled. It offered the punch of caffeine. And yet, despite the best efforts of the Tea Association of the U.S.A., iced and sweetened tea never became, as press releases of the day promised, "America's national drink."
Somewhere along the way, a national passion for iced and sweetened tea ebbed. And a Southern devotion blossomed.
Maybe that change began with the repeal of Prohibition in 1933. Alternatives to alcohol were no longer national priorities. Much of the urban North went wet quickly.
The South, however, lagged, most famously in Mississippi, where the sale of alcoholic beverages was illegal until 1966. Southern teetotalers — and those who snuck a drink now and again — didn't toss their gooseneck iced tea spoons on the rubbish heap. They adopted the beverage as a totem, one that, as luck would have it, slaked the thirst of a farmhand or factory worker like no other.
Over time, other factors came into play, factors that won over the Southern palate once and for all. Fred Thompson of North Carolina, author of the book "Iced Tea," believes that Southerners liked the way that tannins in iced and sweetened tea play off the richness of lard-fried foods like chicken and catfish.
Or maybe, just maybe, says Thompson, "We came to appreciate how the sugar in sweet tea complemented the vinegary pucker of the sauces we pour on our barbecue and the pepper vinegars we sprinkle on our greens. It could be that those preferences — that union of sugar and vinegar — were adopted more or less at the same time."
The iced tea solution offered at Watershed is both elegant and efficient. But Watershed isn't the only Southern restaurant to offer a simple syrup solution. At Crook's Corner, the Chapel Hill, N.C., restaurant where, in the 1980s, Bill Neal led the revival of traditional Southern cookery, tea comes iced but not sugared, and simple syrup is available on request. At Highlands Bar and Grill, Frank Stitt's jewel in Birmingham, pitchers of mint-infused simple syrup grace linen-shrouded tables, proving that, in the land of corn bread panzanella, accommodations must be made.
Don't expect simple syrup service to sweep the region, however. Much less the nation. Owing to the labor and finesse required, it's unlikely that down-market and quick service restaurants will follow. As for who will lead, the smart money is on Milo's.
Their ascension won't be easy. In 2006, McDonald's entered the market, rolling out sweet tea to 3,000 restaurants across the South. And there are other brands with regional aspirations, including Delta Blues Iced Tea, a citrusy blend conceived in Illinois but brewed in Georgia, and Sweet Leaf Tea, an Austin, Texas-based company that touts its use of organic cane sugar and organic black tea.
Curiously, Clayton Christopher, the 30-something founder of Sweet Leaf, credits Milo's as, in part, his inspiration. Christopher tasted the tea on a road trip and was, in a sip, converted.
"I saw how much passion he had for making good tea," Christopher told a reporter for the Austin American Statesman in 2004, talking of his meeting with Ronnie Carlton. "And when he told me he was satisfied with selling tea only in that region, I knew what I wanted to do."
According to Jay Evers, that's old news. Out-of-date. Those regional limits no longer apply to Milo's.
"Sweet tea is a Southern thing," he says. "We all know that. But it's Southern only because we haven't found a way to get it in the hands of Yankees."
John T. Edge is the author of numerous books about Southern food traditions. His most recent work is a revised edition of "Southern Belly: The Ultimate Food Lover's Companion to the South" (Algonquin, $14.95), released this year. He is also the director of the Southern Foodways Alliance at the University of Mississippi in Oxford. The SFA documents and celebrates the diverse food cultures of the American South. Go to www.southernfoodways.com.
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