My wife brought a Hamilton Beach iced tea maker back with her in August of last year (when she only stayed for a month) and it sat on my kitchen counter, gathering dust, until she returned permanently a week ago today. I had an instant iced tea in a jar, also collecting dust, for at least two months. In fact, the moisture from humidity was absorbed each time it was opened and the last time I opened it, the powder was hard. I tossed it the same day my wife arrived.

Teabags

One of my sisters-in-law is living with her soon-to-be husband. He spent months (a couple of years, I think) as an overseas Filipino worker in Qatar. Each time he returned for vacation, he brought something back for me. The last time, he brought back a box of "Lipton Yellow Label" teabags which sat in a kitchen drawer until the day my wife returned.

My wife also brought three boxes of Luzianne teabags with her, so we have plenty of teabags to go through before we have to get some more. I've only been drinking one or two cups of coffee per day, in the early morning, since my wife arrived. I've been drinking brewed iced tea the rest of the time. I had actually forgotten how much better brewed iced tea tastes than instant iced tea. I'm sure I'm not the first to say there's a world of difference.

Brewing the Tea

The reservoir above the carafe can hold as many teabags as you see fit to use. I prefer to use five of the small ones or three of the large ones. The drip "switch" at the bottom can be set to mild, medium or strong. I really don't see the point, but I set it to strong. After the tea is finished brewing, and it shuts off just like an automatic drip coffee maker would, the tea is a dark, "golden" brown. That's the best description I can use, but it looks awesome considering it's actually black tea.

My wife was the first to make iced tea with the tea maker. She tried putting the ice in the carafe before brewing, but it melted by the time the brewing was completed. The second time, she added ice after the fact and that worked fine. It still melted quickly, so I told her to just forgo the ice and we could add ice to our glasses each time we filled them with tea. That's what we've been doing ever since.

Coffee or Tea?

I still need my coffee in the morning, when it's still cool outside and prefer it during the late evening once it cools down again. In between, I like to drink iced tea instead of plain water.

What's going to be interesting, over the next month or so, is finding more teabags made with black tea. I've found some with green tea, but none with black tea, and I don't like green tea. I guess the search will go hand in hand with my search for a decent coffee maker.

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There are so many ways to make iced tea, it's probably impossible to write about all of them. I'm going to try to cover the ways that I've done it, my mother and siblings have done it and the way I've seen other people do it. I'll start with the picture you see on the left.

The Hamilton Beach Iced Tea Maker

I always thought that making iced tea was incredibly simple and couldn't be made any easier. Actually, the simplest way is to use instant iced tea. In my opinion, however, instant iced tea tastes like utter garbage compared to iced tea being made from freshly-brewed tea using tea bags.

The Hamilton Beach Iced Tea Maker is one of several kitchen gadgets that makes brewing a half-gallon (two quarts) of tea extremely easy. All you have to do is to fill the reservoir with water, put the tea bags into the chamber at the top of the serving pitcher, and turn it on. In 10 minutes, you have freshly-brewed tea. I wouldn't recommend putting ice in the pitcher, as displayed, before brewing or you're just going to end up with more water.

The instructions won't tell you how much tea to put in the chamber. Based on experience, I would use one or two of the large tea bags or three or four of the small tea bags. To be honest, I've had one of these iced tea makers sitting on my kitchen counter for almost two months and I've yet to use it. I still have a jar of instant iced tea in an upper cupboard and it's still only half empty. I drink a lot more coffee than I do tea.

Old-Fashioned Tea Brewing

The way my mother and siblings brewed tea was to put tea bags in a sauce pan and let it boil for 10 or 15 minutes. After the tea cooled a little, the tea bags would be thrown away and the tea would be transferred to a gallon pitcher. Water would then be added to the pitcher to make the full gallon.

The tea bags wouldn't be thrown away immediately. They usually poured the brewed tea into the pitcher, poured more water into the pan and then poured that water into the pitcher before adding more plain water. This was how they extracted the last remaining amount of tea still in the tea bags.

Sun Tea

In places where the sun shines most of the year, people make sun tea. There have even been entrepreneuring companies making specialty glass containers for sun tea.

The way we always made sun tea was by filling an old pickle jar (which held a gallon) with water, put five of the small tea bags or three of the large tea bags in, and put the lid back on. We would leave it out in the sun for about an hour because we liked it strong.

Iced Tea – The Final Ingredients

Some people add nothing to the tea except ice cubes. Other people add sugar. Sometimes creamer is added to hot tea, but never to iced tea.

A lot of people, mostly US southerners, like sweet iced tea. One of the chicken places I went to when I lived in that area provided sweet iced tea with almost every order of chicken. It was so sweet; it was almost too sweet to drink.

I prefer my iced tea to be slightly sweetened. No more than two spoonfuls of sugar with 8-12 ounces of tea is enough.

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