1y ago

Sweet tea

255 comments

But sugar dissolves in cold water. It just takes a bit longer. This is 9th grade chemistry. At 20°C 203.9g sugar are soluble per 100ml of water.
[Edit: Sorry, for the Americans here: At 68°F, 1 cup of sugar is soluble in 21/50 cups of water.]
Wikipedia (de): Zucker cites Hans-Albert Kurzhals: Lexikon Lebensmitteltechnik. Volume 2: L – Z. Behr, Hamburg 2003, ISBN 3-86022-973-7, p. 723.
- And most of all, solubility being a function of the temperature, if you lower it the excess sugar will leave the solution and cristallize.
  
  I came here to say this, but the best Aqua is without sugar anyway.
  
  It takes time for that to happen and in the meantime you can have a gross oversaturated solution.
  Edit: not even oversaturated, would just take a long time for all that sugar to dissolve unless it's hot.
- Have you seen how much sugar those hicks put into their tea though? It's gotta be hot because they put coca cola grade amounts of sugar, to the point where it wont dissolve in the water anymore. Sweet tea contains 36-38 grams of sugar per 16 oz. That's a fucking soft drink.
  
  Grams per ounce? You guys are savages with your units for concentration.
  
  16 oz (454ml) can dissolve some 900 grams of sugar, far in excess of 38 grams. Sugar is ridiculously soluble in water.
  
  When I make my sweet tea, I use two cups per gallon, which comes out to about 50g of sugar per 16oz. And it’s delicious! It’s definitely not a “drink all the time” type drink. I only make it a few times a year for friends.
- example: you don't make a pitcher of kool-aid with hot water.
  however, adding sugar to the hot tea does work better than adding it after it's already chilled.
  
  How? Wouldn't the excess sugar just come out of solution when the tea cools down again?
- That's very thoughtful of you to provide the imperial measurements as well for Americans ☺️

Well that explains the diabeetus.
- That is really just a map of poverty.
  
  Hawaii doesn't check out, but they do look very similar
  
  I'm going to look at how poverty is defined. You just gave me an idea for my grad school program.
- Sugar should be heavily taxed, it's so dangerous at rates of more than 10 grams a day
  
  It should be taxed on the corporate side. Taxing sugar on the consumer side becomes a poor tax, because poor people will still want sweets from time to time, making those treats now more and more expensive. Well off people will just accept the tax because it's marginal to them, but when your chocolate bar that you treat yourself to once a week goes from 1.29 to 3.29, then it really fucks your day up.
  What should be done is incentives to provide less sugar/glucose-fructose on the product side and encourage companies to make snacks and beverages that have less sugar content.
  
  Whoa settle down there
  Sucrose is 1:1 glucose/ fructose which is near the optimal 0.8 ratio for fueling endurance activities
  I rode 100 miles solo in less than 5 hours Sunday on 360g sucrose in 4 750ml bottles
  It’sa lot cheaper than all that fancy SIS/skratch etc
  Carbs aren’t poison if you move your body
  
  I don't doubt the number, that means 0.5l soda is 5 times the daily rate!
  And when you drink sugar free, your body still crave the sugar.
  
  yes.
- Would love to see an updated graph. I feel like everyone gained 50lbs in the last three years.
- screw you for getting it right

i hate when i go down south and go to restaurants and order iced tea and get a glass of concentrated sugar water
- diabetus by L Ron Hubbard

Lemmy is now getting reposts. We've reached critical mass!
- I don't see the point of having reposts here, not like there's visible karma or anything.
  Also, I loved you in that thing!
  
  Reposts aren't just because of karma removed. It can be a crosspost or someone saw it and just thought it was funny and wanted to share it to a community they liked.
  You may also be one of the first 10,000 today too.

Well, it's the gays or atheists. Or "colored" people. Or whoever they are told to hate at that moment. This happens more than you know in this day and age:
- Surprised you forgot "people who might be transgender (wE cAn AlWaYs TeLl)"
  
  Of course they can tell, how else are they going to pick their preferred partners to cheat on their wives with.
- I'm preemptively not serving gardeners or lawyers just to stay ahead of the curve.
  
  I play tennis and don’t serve against gay people. They make me feel funny with their passionate moaning. /s
  
  I'm swinging back in the other direction and refusing to serve rednecks and people with navy suits and red ties.
  
  I mean... lawyers are pretty terrible. Case in point: most of Congress are lawyers.
- I've lived in the deep south for over 40 years in small towns, and have never witnessed a single instance of any minority being denied service at any establishment.
  Has anyone reading this actually ever seen that happen in real life?
  
  This is anecdotal but I have seen this as a gay man living in Ohio. My whole family is from the sticks but I live just outside a major city now. There's a pizza place back home that my fiance and I can't go to because they won't serve him (he is, admittedly, quite fabulous). I can go alone, because I blend in, but him they will just quietly ignore and occasionally glance over to check if he's gotten the hint yet. No yelling, no epithets, but no service either.
  
  I grew up in FL and was denied service 2 separate times for being mixed race. This occurred in the early 2000s. Both times the restaurants were subtlety segregated and they refused to seat us in either section.
  
  Yep. I grew up in the mountains of NC. When I was a kid, the mayor of our town was the head of the local KKK sect. Needless to say, non-white people were generally not found in that town.
  Attitudes did change over the following years, so that was nice.
  
  I am not from the deep south but close enough. I haven't seen anything like what people online seem to think it's like around here, it's overly exaggerated. That's not to say discrimination doesn't ever happen, I'm sure there's pockets here and there. I personally don't know a single person who is ok with that crap.
  
  It might be because you aren't a visible minority that you haven't witnessed it, you don't notice it happening because it's not on your radar that it could happen.
- Stay in the cities (50k and up), its the small in-between towns that can get bad. Bigger the better
  
  No thanks, my town has less than 6000 population, and I can easily afford my mortgage on my house that sits on an acre of land. It's nice being my own landlord, and I can do whatever the fuck I want here.

As a server, southerners stare at me in wide eyed awe when I pour a disgusting amount of simple syrup into a glass of iced tea.
- What do they think they do at the factory?
  
  Factory? Hell nah, we home brew in this household
  
  Corn syrup
  
  That's a trade secret!
  
  They're not buying tea in jugs, dear.
- simple syrup
  Wait, do americans use glucose syrup in kitchen?
  
  It's just a high concentration of sugar dissolved in water. Not used in food really unless you need to sweeten some cold tea for some southerners, i guess. Very commonly used to make alcoholic mixed drinks though.
  
  I think mainly behind the bar, I don't know too many folks who cook with it.

This seems like a US thing I’m too European to understand
(aka. they bring us the ingredients, and we make our own tea at the restaurant table)
- What's called sweet tea in the US is overwhelmingly sweet. That was my reaction to it the first time I tried it. It's so sweet, the only way you can get that much sugar in it is if you dissolve that sugar in hot tea.
  
  The trick is to order half sweet/half unsweet. Otherwise you get Aunt Jemima on ice.
  
  Sweet tea can have as much sugar as soda. You would need to add 10-15 sugar packets to a single glass of iced tea to have the equivalent amount of sugar.
  
  Not true about being able to only dissolve the sugar in hot tea, because if it was, the sugar would fall out once it cooled. You can dissolve the sugar into cold tea, it just takes more effort (so time and mixing) than doing it with hot tea and then cooling it. Cold water can hold approx. 1.7g of sugar per gram of water.
- If I order a cup of tea, I don't want to get a cup of hot water and a tea bag. Bloody continentals.
  
  FUCKIN LIPTON
  THAT'S NOT TEA
- Yeah in the US they have this thing called sweet tea (some places have a choice between sweet and unsweetened tea).
  To make sweet tea they just unload a tanker truck full of gum syrup into cold tea. That's what it tastes like to me.
- Sweet tea is a drink prepared hot but consumed cold. The cold part is best done via refrigeration. Bringing hot water, tea, and sugar are not going to achieve the same results.
  
  it’s best not done at all to be honest. Just drink a soda like a regular person.

"four seasons-having piece of shit" lol I'm going to start discriminating against people based on their seasons.
"Everybody is welcome at my house!... as long as you've experienced snow, that is"
- When I moved to L.A. from Indiana, I met people who had never seen snow up close. It was so weird to me.
  
  I moved from Pennsylvania to Louisiana when I was a teenager, and was most bummed about losing out on snow boarding. Now when I'm out traveling, I get to explain how fun (and practical) "hurricane parties" are. Everywhere is strange when you're a stranger I guess
  
  When I taught in Compton I remember asking the kids if they had gone anywhere interesting during their summer break. One kid raised his hand and said he "went to LA". It was like a 15-20 minute bus ride away.
- As a person who has never seen snow, I'm feeling very discriminated lmao
  
  Don't worry, in 50 years, no one will see snow.
  
  It's worth the trip, I promise. I grew up in Phoenix so I didn't see it for a long time. It's nuts. It absorbs sound really well, so after fresh snowfall, everything is so quiet it's surreal. And then you hear the sound and sensation of walking through it, which is an experience in and of itself.
  
  I do hope you get the chance someday, it's always cool to experience something new in nature like that. I still really want to see the Aurora Borealis someday!
  But still... stay tf away from me until you've experienced snow, you warm-climated monster! I hope you have a good day though

Sugar will dissolve in unsweet tea, it's just slower. If you can't dissolve it in cold tea, then it wouldn't stay in solution in hot tea that was cooled down.
For someone complaining about northerners not knowing 9th grade chemistry, it sure sounds like they weren't paying attention themselves.
- Chemistry knowledge! Sweet tea is actually a supersaturated solution. That means there more sugar in the water than could normally be held in suspension. This is achieved by heating the water so you can dissolve more solute in and then chilling it. Remember theres at least 2 diabetes worth of sugar per glass.
  
  That's kind of disgusting. So southern style sweet tea is basically just tea flavored simple syrup?
  
  Masshole that lives in the south I have no idea how everyone I know isn't on insulin. Sweet tea is an abomination of sugar.
  
  Where did you get that? It would be like honey if that was correct. Also, that is not called suspension but solution, since the particles dissolve (unlike fat in milk, but that is an emulsion since the fat is a liquid).
  
  I thought a supersaturated solution could easily be brought out of supersaturation by something like sticking a spoon in it? Am I misremembering?
  
  I highly doubt that, since any shock or impurity would cause a supersaturated solution to separate into a solution and the excess sugar.
- You're technically correct, but completely missing the point that folks want to be able to actually drink it a reasonably short time after it's been served.

Damn, I knew sugar was bad for you, but boy it looks like it can make you really irritable. Stop drinking so much sugar y'all. It's nasty.
- honestly I'm straight up addicted to Nestea Zero. My teeth aren't rotting out and I'm not worried about diabetes but I need to get off this stuff

That's OK. I don't eat 'em.

Perhaps the real tea is the shitposts we made along the way.

I mean it would be inconvenient but they would still dissolve, they aren't super saturating sweetened tea in the south.
- That's exactly what they are doing for tea in the south.
  
  No, even with the 2 cups of sugar per gallon it seems to make sweetend tea it still isn't super saturating the mixture. It might make it take longer to dissolve but it's not because the tea is fully saturated. They could put 4 cute per gallon and it still wouldn't be fully saturated, even when cold.
  
  Not quite. It gets close to saturation with some of the sweetest brands, but typically no. See below comment for where this confusion is coming from. Remember that rate of dissolution varies as temperature...
- Don't give them ideas
- Maybe someone should introduce her to a spoon.

And I hate when they have only sweet tea...
- Or when you order unsweetened, but you still get sweet anyways...
  
  I hate sweet tea and I hate that I have to go UNsweet when going through a drive through. Like that. With emphasis. It should be the default. Sugar is an addition.
  
  This happens because a lot of ordering systems default to ticketing teas as sweet tea and iced tea instead of something sane like sweet tea and unsweet tea
  
  that should be a crime.
  but... complaining about the tea virtually anywhere on earth is not advised.

Maybe the amount of sugar that cold water easily accepts is the correct amount to not taste like shit
- Yeah, and if you saturate hot tea, won''t the sugar simply materialize back as the tea gets colder? Seems to me that nothing about this has to do with saturation.
  
  Water can dissolve a ridiculous amount of sugar even at room temp. For an average 12 oz glass of tea, the most sugar that could dissolve is a whopping 700 grams. One packet of sugar is about 5 grams. At the saturation point it would be basically syrup thickness, too.
  
  Yes. Not sure what the other person is on about. Hot water can have more sugar dissolved in it. When it cools it crystalizes but only if the saturation level is higher than what the water can hold. It's how rock candy is made. This is like basic chemistry.
  
  No, I can assure you sugar does not re-crystalize after being mixed in hot tea. It is super interesting how differently people view this subject just based on where they grew up.

the correct response to somebody trying to order sweet tea in the north is and always has been this quote from 30 rock:
“I'm gonna come back in 5 minutes, if you try to order off menu again I will slap those glasses off your face.”

Sweet tea is trash anyway. Might as well just dump sugar into the water and drink it why even have the tea in it at all
- It really is. I was raised in South Carolina and drank sweet tea regularly as a child. In my college years, I had easy access to as much as I wanted and gained around 50 pounds. One summer, I realized how much better I felt drinking less of it and swore it off. By swapping sweet tea for water, I lost all that weight and have kept it off for 20 years.
  Nowadays, I've gained an appreciation for unsweetened iced tea. The initial sip is always a shock when restaurants accidentally serve me sweet tea.
  
  Just a follow-up for my neighbors in the southeast: don't fall for the sweet tea propaganda. Regardless of culture or tradition, it's a bad habit.

It's mostly water?
I don't have to heat up lemonade to make the sugar dissolve in it; why would tea be different?
- Narrator: it's not different.
- It isn't. If you have to heat the water to get sugar to dissolve in it 1) you have too much sugar and 2) when it cools again the sugar will prwcipitate out. It is easier and quicker to dissolve in hot water tho, so if you're impatient it may appear that the sugar won't dissolve in cold water.

We got Union as hell on this post, didn't we. Every time I come back it has more comments.
I'm still mad as fuck that I can't get my precious Lipton Instant Tea at Walmart, because I really was raised in a trailer park, so maybe that's why I had to delete my own giant shitty comment about this.
- And to think, I was just shitposting.

Also are we going to talk about the fact that I've never heard anyone outside of the south pronounce pecan as "pee-can?"
- What? Canada pronounces it "pee-can" instead of "peh-cawn".
  
  Up against the wall!
  
  I'm not talking about that far North.
  
  Yeah, we follow the pronunciation rules of English. What pronunciation rules does "peh-cawn" follow?
- ✋ I'm not from the south and I pronounce it pee-can along with everyone I know
- As a northerner, I've never heard pee-can either. I think it's a straw man for southerners
- we really need to get some linguists on Lemmy because i miss communities like r/fauxnetics
  this is why they should just teach IPA in schools lol whats the point of these phonetic spellings when the point is that many dialects of english pronounce the same word differently
  OP was probably talking about /'pi.cæn/ as in "can of beans" compared to /pɪ'can/ as in "con man". they altered "pee" even though that part sounds nearly the same! probably because a Pee Can is a funny image.
- How else are you supposed to pronounce it?
  
  Puh - kahn
- Pee-kin

I kinda like the sugar at the bottom, but I'm a degenerate like that. (I've mostly excised my sweet tooth now. My dad is in his 50s and almost died from diabetic shock, with no knowledge of his condition)

Sweet tea is extremely common up north. Wtf you talking about?
- Texas Roadhouse and whatever is in the gas station cooler do not count.
  In case anyone needs it, Texas Roadhouse serves proper sweet tea, brewed hot, put over ice, all that. It's kinda their gimmick.
  
  I am not even referring to that. Sweet tea was never a southern thing, they just claimed it as theirs for no good reason. My grandmother makes her own, her grandmother made her own and they only ever lived in the North. I been to friends houses where their parents made it. This was in PA and NJ. I personally hate tea so I would get offered it and turn it down all the time.
- Of course we have sweet tea, but they are from the South, so being stupid comes naturally for them.
  
  Hey look! Bigotry being upvoted in a post condemning bigotry. Shocker.
  
  They aren't from where I'm from. They are all stupid, racist, idiots, bad. OK man. I'm sure you're the only one with the right perspective on the world.

Lawl. There was a point somewhere in that rant. I went to university in the South and I do miss the food on occasion.

Sweet tea is fucking disgusting and anyone who drinks that shit ought to be ashamed of themselves.

Now that's a person that has heard, "Bless your heart."

It would dissolve you just have to be more patient!
- You couldn't make it the disgusting super saturated diabetes juice like they do in the south without heating it though. Mr 'Im not racist but....' is actually right about that.
  
  Sweet tea usually has 2 cups (400 grams) of sugar per gallon (some "real southerners" use more.. a lot more)- so a 16 ounce glass (11 ounces of liquid, accounting for ice) will have (at least) 34.37 grams of sugar (about the same as a coke). A sugar packet has 2-4 grams of sugar. So, if you get the small ones, you'd need to sit there an open and pour about 17 packets of sugar.
  They will dissolve. The saturation limit for sugar in 0℃ water is 180 grams per 100ml. There are 29.57ml per ounce, so 325.27ml in 11oz. 180gm * 3.2527= 585.486gm. So, you can dissolve 585.486 grams of sugar (or 292 sugar packets) in 11 ounces of 0℃ water.
  You could do more if it were boiling- 490g of sugar can dissolve in 100ml of boiling water, so 490 * 3.2527 = 1593.823 grams or 796 sugar packets in 11 oz of water, but honestly, that seems excessive, even for the south.
  
  Is it actually super saturated? Those solutions tend to rather unstable, though I've never played around with a super saturated sugar solution before.

As they say, pick your battles.

It's pronounced "diabitis"

Or with every meal, "would you like grits with that?" No! Grits are disgusting!! Stop it!

Based

I have never been in a place in the South where they don't serve gays

Never really liked sweet tea, but Suntea is great.

most areas of the u.s. you gotta pick one, sweet or not sweet. since I rarely if ever add sugar to anything, sweet tea is to me an excuse to drink flavored sugar water. but cheaper than soda and it doesn't go flat.
so sweet iced tea is a perverse adulteration of a refreshing yet bitter, tasty beverage. i mean, add some lemon fer real. if i'm south of certain landmarks, i know i won't drink tea unless i make it myself.
- Every place in the south will additionally have unsweet for those that will use artificial sweetener. Or those that want half and half (to dilute the sugar content, make half sweet, half unsweet).
  It's only outside of the south that you get a singular choice of unsweet.

North of what? South of what?
- the mason dixon line noob
  
  What country is that in?

Use Splenda, fool!

255 comments