Iced-Tea Line

An interesting little article about those who drink sweet tea, and those who prefer it naturally. The "semi-scientific study" is pretty neat! (For the record, for those who don't know, I'm a yankee tea drinker, despite my southern roots.... unlike Dear Husband who would rather chew his sugared tea... *shudder*)

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Many thanks to Steve Hendrix for two weeks of superb posts in the Guest Blogger slot here on the big show--Steve showed fabulous range and took us all on some delightful journeys, including his last contribution, last Friday, in which he explored the ancient and contemporary mysteries of the Iced Tea Line, that uncharted boundary between the Land of Sweet Tea and the Nation of The Unsweetened, a border that defines much of what's still distinctive about regions of the United States, and, Steve posited, a line that likely runs through Virginia.

Sure enough, just minutes after Steve posted his piece, a reader--"Tucker"--came up with a link to what appears to be a semi-scientific study mapping out the Iced Tea Line, and indeed it runs smack across south central Virginia. Obviously, there are exceptions to the rule: We can all cite places here in the Washington area that didn't get the memo about being north of the Iced Tea Line, but in general, the data points on that site look reasonable enough. (The anonymous researcher who created the Iced Tea Line map also informs us that sweet tea is a remarkably recent invention, reportedly winning widespread popularity only at the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis. But a more nuanced version of that story, here, argues that sweet tea was fairly common for many years before that, yet even this account concedes that the Fair did play a role in spreading the word about the thirst-quenching power of the drink.)

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