How I Like My Tea

Everything you need to know about me, you can learn from how I like my iced tea:

1. Luzianne’s my brand. Besides tasting fine, it’s made by Reily Foods Company which is based in New Orleans. I like the idea of supporting the local economy. I nourish the hope that, in a more enlightened future, we’ll deem a successful economy to be one in which the distance between production, consumption and waste disposal is as short as possible. Alas, that’s not today’s world, where we burn vast amounts of nonrenewable resources just to get goods from Point A to Point B. And truth to tell I’m not sure where my Luzianne tea is actually made. Reily Foods has manufacturing facilities in Knoxville and Baltimore as well as New Orleans. And where is the tea grown?
2. Sun-brewed. Cuz I’m a tree-hugging environmentalist. Using the sun’s energy to brew my tea — I think that’s really cool. I did a little research and found you can make solar cookers for food. Xy’s done it with her students as a science experiment: They put foil inside a pizza box, made a cellophane window to let the light in, and cooked hot dogs.
3. Double strength. Cuz I’m a caffeine fiend. Yes, I use five or six tea bags per gallon instead of the recommended three. I also let it steep for an extra long time. The tea come out so strong it almost makes me sick sometimes, especially if I guzzle a couple large glasses on an empty stomach. But it gets me buzzed. It makes my bowels move. It alters my perspective on reality. But it’s not really as strong as coffee, which is nice, because if I miss my tea I don’t get withdrawal symptoms.
4. Ice cold, but no ice. I’ll use ice if the tea hasn’t had time to chill properly, but I don’t like it, because the ice melts and dilutes the tea. I even went to the trouble of make tea ice-cubes to alleviate this problem, but the tea stains the ice cube tray.
5. No lemon. I don’t know what this means, but it seems important.
6. No sugar. I’ve been told this is a Yankee thing. Yes, I was raised north of the Mason-Dixon line. But I recall people in Indiana liked their sugar just as much as any Southeners. As for me, I’ve never had much of a sweet-tooth. Don’t really know why. In any event, I subscribe to the notion that refined sugar is, if not the Root of All Evil, at least a Very Bad Thing. I’m sure if I started to put sugar in my tea I’d grow to like it, and then couldn’t do without it, so I’ve never started. I don’t need the empty calories.
7. Only in the summer. Come the colder weather, I’ll be drinking coffee.