Today, anyone who visits the South needs to know the peculiar lexicography and protocol of our "house wine."

• Since at least the 1940s, and probably since the early 1930s, in living memory for many Southerners today, the iced part has been taken for granted: iced tea is "tea" or, at best, "icetea"; persons who want it hot must ask for "hot tea."
  
  
• From the 1930s through the 1970s, most Southern iced tea was sweetened-thickly sweetened. Southerners have an overriding preference for sweet drinks and as anyone who has tried it knows, sugar is much easier to dissolve in warm liquid than cold, so cooks began sweetening the tea before chilling it. The practice is mentioned as early as 1880 (cf. The Buckeye Cook Book), was widespread by the late 1920s (cf. Mrs. Dull's Southern Cooking), and practically universal by the early 1930s (cf. 200 Years of Charleston Cooking).
  
  
• Since the early 1970s, with the widespread use of powdered artificial sweeteners that dissolve easily in cold liquid, restaurants and many homemakers all over the South gradually began serving both sweetened and unsweetened iced tea. Today, a visitor to the South will be asked "sweet-er-unsweet?" when they order their tea. Those in the know will order "sweet tea" or "unsweet tea" to begin with.
  
  
• A few heretical restaurants in the South have today reverted to serving only unsweetened tea, presumably because it is easier than having two separate urns. But born and bred Southerners frown on such practice, calling it "Yankee tea".
  
  
• Some Southerners like to enliven their iced tea not only with lemon and mint, but with a shot of whiskey or sherry as well. It's actually an old British idea: Queen Victoria did not care for tea unless there was a healthy splash of scotch whiskey in the cup (Weintraub, Stanley. Victoria. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1987).

Next : Iced Tea: The American Brew Uncovered