The default is cold
A description of something people do now, compiled from published accounts rather than from practice.
Order tea in an American restaurant and what arrives, absent any other instruction, is a tall glass of ice with black tea poured over it, unsweetened outside the South, with a lemon wedge and free refills. Hot tea is a separate item, is often an afterthought — a mug of hot water and a bag on the saucer — and is ordered by a minority. This is the reverse of the situation almost everywhere else tea is drunk in quantity, and it is the single most important fact about American tea consumption. The proportions are worth stating without a figure: iced accounts for the large majority of tea drunk in the United States, and the ready-to-drink bottled and canned category is a very large business on top of it. A catalogue that describes American tea through speciality loose leaf has described a rounding error and called it the market.
The 1904 story
Repeated very widely and not evidenced. Recorded because the story is itself part of the culture, not because it happened.
The story is that iced tea was invented at the 1904 World’s Fair in St Louis, by a merchant whose hot tea was not selling in the heat and who poured it over ice in desperation. It is repeated in newspapers, on packaging, in reference works and by tea companies every summer. It is not true as an invention claim: iced tea, and recipes for it, are documented well before that fair. What the fair plausibly did was popularise and publicise it to a very large audience, which is a different and much duller claim. TeaHQ records the story as a legend because that is what it is, and notes the shape it shares with the Duchess of Bedford and afternoon tea: a single named occasion, a moment of improvisation, a vivid image, and a real practice that demonstrably predates it. Tea writing produces this pattern so reliably that a reader can hold any invention-at-a-moment story about a widespread drink in suspicion until shown otherwise.
How it is actually made
A description of something people do now, compiled from published accounts rather than from practice.
In restaurants, by a dedicated brewer that produces several gallons at a time from a large filter pack, held in a plastic urn with a tap and poured over ice to order. At home, by brewing hot and chilling, by sun tea left in a jar in the window, or by cold brewing overnight; and increasingly by buying it in a bottle. The tea used is inexpensive black tea selected to stay clear when cold, since a tea that clouds on chilling looks wrong in a glass even though nothing is wrong with it. That cloudiness problem is the one genuinely technical thing in this record. Chilling a strong black tea causes some of its compounds to come out of solution and haze the liquid, which producers handle by blending, by processing, or by adding a little hot water at the end. It is why commercial iced tea is made from particular blends, and why home-brewed iced tea often looks murkier than the restaurant version.
Sweet, unsweet, and the line between them
A description of something people do now, compiled from published accounts rather than from practice.
The sweetened Southern form — sugar dissolved into the tea while hot, in quantity, before chilling — is a distinct regional tradition and has its own record in this catalogue. Elsewhere the default is unsweetened with sugar or sweetener offered at the table, which does not dissolve properly in a cold drink and is a permanent minor annoyance of the format. The half-and-half of tea and lemonade is a standard order under a golfer’s name. The regional boundary between sweet and unsweet defaults is real, is joked about, and is a genuine cultural marker. What holds across the country is the glass: large, full of ice, refilled without being asked, and drunk with food rather than between meals. Tea in the United States is a table beverage in the position that a soft drink occupies, which is precisely why it does not feel to Americans like the same category of thing that a British or Turkish or Japanese person means by tea.