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. I've see creamer 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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• Iced Tea — When It's Too Hot to Drink Coffee