Damn Yankees!
Aug 25th, 2006 by Jason
Sweet tea is a staple of life around here (second only to air, at least during the summer), and pretty much everyone worth their salt knows that at a self-serve beverage bar, sweet tea should always be fresh-brewed and only ever dispensed from gizmos that look like this:
EXHIBIT 1
A place that only offers Nasty Nestea from one of this things might as well not offer tea at all:
EXHIBIT 2
So imagine my horror today at lunch (at Gotti’s Grinders) as I went to fill my lovely cup with what I thougth was freshly-brewed sweet tea (from something that very much resembled EXHIBIT 1), only to hear the usual mechanical pppttttttt sound that comes from a soda fountain like the one in EXHIBIT 2.
Those Nestea fuckers had gone and moved their fountain sweet tea apart from the regular soda fountain over into a soda fountain disguised as a freshly-brewed sweet tea dispenser, functioning spigot and all.
I about cried.
If you don’t understand the importance of sweet tea, please check out this awesome article:
http://www.thepilot.com/stories/20060812/news/columns/20060812dodson.html
That has been common place around here for some time… If you open up the lid you can see the normal pop dispenser apparatus..
This is what is known as an “Abomination”. Few places have real tea anymore, and around here, it’s never pre-sweetened.
The best iced tea is made with Nabob tea from Canada, and real sugar. This stuff is hard to come by, but OH so worth it. I’m probably placing an order soon - you want me to send you a couple of boxes?
Oh - they’re also very right about having to add the sugar with the boiling water. It changes how the tea is extracted - I think that the sugar prevents some of the less “pleasant” tea components from being extracted, giving a smoother taste - you can let it brew longer without the bitterness by putting the sugar in with the tea, so it can be dark and sweet and yummy.
I’m scared….some places in Houston offer it, some don’t. I’m going to be carrying bottles of tea that I brew at home….it’s going to be ridiculous. However, when it’s 150 degrees out, I’ll be set.
Tolo, thanks for the offer but I’m far too uncoordinated to brew my own tea. I managed to do it at McDs for 10 years, but that was purely autopilot thru the grace of god at 5:30AM.
BusinessWeek had a cool podcast about the lady that works in Coca Cola that’s trying to shake things up. One thing specificially mentioned was that when the contract w/ local bottlers for Nestea is up, most of the local bottlers plan to carry someone else if Coke doesn’t either fix Nestea or come out with something else. Yay!