How To Make Sweet Tea Soda For A Bubbly Take On The Classic Drink

Sweet tea is the South's unofficial drink of choice, and plenty of folks around the country enjoy sitting outside with a cold glass of sweet tea during a summer day. If that doesn't interest you, then maybe your hypothetical sweet tea is missing an ingredient. For warm summer evenings, some people like to mix that sweet Southern drink with bourbon. For those hot summer afternoons, however (or the evenings too), you can mix together a sweet tea soda instead.

Sweet tea soda is about as simple as it sounds: Pour a mostly full glass of chilled sweet tea, and fill up that remaining space with club soda or any generic, unflavored soda water. Just like regular sweet tea, the tea should ideally be brewed hot and then chilled, which is the traditional way to make it. Once it's cold, you can pop open the carbonated water and top off the tea. If you're short on time, sweet tea soda can still work if you just make some iced tea and add everything else into it straight away, although some may insist it's less flavorful if you do it that way. The only crucial tip is that the drink should have more tea than soda, because that's where all the flavor comes from.

Keep in mind that "soda" here isn't referring to Coca-Cola: Some people may enjoy Coke with tea, but it'll taste extremely sweet and may not provide a flavor pairing you'll like. Instead, "soda" refers to your carbonated water of choice: seltzer, club soda, and tonic water are best for cocktails, but you'd likely want seltzer or club soda for this beverage because of their neutral taste. Tonic water has a bitter flavor which won't blend well with sweet tea. The only difference between seltzer and club soda is the presence of minerals and sometimes sodium in seltzer, which shouldn't have much impact on your sweet tea. Both are flavorless and sugarless, and will allow the flavors of the black tea and sugary syrup in your sweet tea to shine through.

This isn't to say that black tea and sugar are the only flavors you can include. There's still a lot of room for variation: Plenty of bright-tasting fruit juices like orange juice or pineapple juice can be added after you've steeped and cooled the tea. Instead of just a mint garnish, you can add several mint sprigs and make a stronger, refreshing sweet mint tea soda. As an extra piece of advice, plenty of Southerners recommend adding a tiny amount of baking soda to sweet tea to alleviate some of the black tea's bitterness. Whether this works is debatable, but it's worth a shot if your tea is too bitter for you. Finally, of course, you want to end with a lemon wedge garnish, just like you would with any iced tea.