In terms of Texas Tea, greater actually is best. 

Usually described as a cousin of the Lengthy Island Iced Tea, a cocktail recognized for its booze-forward qualities, Texas Tea takes it up a degree. Made with a colossal quantity of liquor sorts, together with lemon juice, easy syrup, and cola, what makes this drink significantly Southern is the addition of bourbon, which provides it an nearly candy tea-like high quality. Although on-line recipes abound, the origins of this so-called Texas cocktail are as murky as its Lengthy Island cousin.

Bourbon and candy tea are classically Southern components. Texas is in the midst of the candy tea belt, a strip of Southern states that features Alabama, Arkansas, Virginia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Indiana, Kentucky, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and Georgia. The oldest recognized recipe for candy iced tea was printed in 1879 in a cookbook referred to as Housekeeping in Outdated Virginia by Marion Cabell Tyree, utilizing iced inexperienced tea, sugar, and lemon. By the 1900s, black tea grew to become the default for iced tea, and within the Twenties, Prohibition introduced alongside an iced tea increase as folks looked for different drinks to exchange alcohol. (It’s additionally doable that in this time, iced tea was a handy strategy to cover unlawful liquor consumption, and Prohibition-era bars would serve liquor in teacups to keep away from suspicion.)

Spiked tea punches have additionally lengthy been common with the British aristocracy, a behavior that was handed on to Southern planters in Virginia. Recipes from the early 1800s featured chilled inexperienced tea punches much like at the moment’s candy tea, containing a baffling array of wine, liquor, and sugar, corresponding to an 1839 punch recipe from Kentucky combining claret or Champagne with cream, numerous sugar, and inexperienced tea in a punch bowl. 

One of the well-known tea punch recipes, an American recipe referred to as Regent’s Punch from 1815, comprises brandy, arrack, Champagne, and rum tempered with inexperienced tea, sugar, and citrus juice. It was a success with the British, who named it Regent’s Punch as an ode to their convivial, liquor-loving King George IV. This potent brew of tea and liquor can be thought-about the closest early progenitor of Texas Tea if the cocktail have been to include precise tea, which it doesn’t. The tea-like coloring comes from the cola and amber-hued bourbon.

It’s most certainly that Texas Tea was a company invention.

In response to Classic American Cocktails, “The Texas Iced Tea was invented by TGI Fridays in 1980 to rejoice the fortieth anniversary of its mum or dad firm Carlson.” The chain put 4 variations of the Lengthy Island Iced Tea on its menu: the Lengthy Seashore Iced Tea, the Glowing Iced Tea, the Caribbean Iced Tea, and the Texas Iced Tea. The Texas Iced Tea added an extra ounce of whiskey to the cocktail, and the pattern caught on.

TGI Friday’s declined to touch upon how they got here up with the cocktail.

Nonetheless, Nico Martini, the Dallas-based creator of Texas Cocktails, a seminal information to cocktail historical past within the Lone Star state, means that the time period might be a branding technique.

“I’ve this joke that I inform when folks ask me in regards to the [Texas Cocktails] e-book,” says Martini. “After I began, I researched all the basic cocktails that got here from Texas and I discovered each of them: Ranch Water and Chilton. I suppose you may throw Mexican Martini in there however… gross,” he says.

Martini discovered the same affiliation when researching the Texas Fizz, which was really invented by two London bartenders.

“I at all times discover when folks throw ‘Texas’ in entrance of one thing but it surely’s truthfully, at all times been advertising. Texas is extremely proud and Texas helps Texas,” says Martini. “I’ve moved exhausting into whiskey and one of many first issues I began to note was a bunch of whiskey with armadillos and spurs and longhorns on the label claiming Texas whiskey after they have been, in truth, merely sourced from Indiana, Kentucky or Tennessee,” he says.

In John Steinbeck’s memoir Travels With Charley: In Search of America, he writes, “I’ve mentioned that Texas is a frame of mind, however I feel it’s greater than that. It’s a mystique carefully approximating a faith.” 

Maybe that may be a higher manner of explaining the phenomenon of Texas Tea. The mystique of the state has captured common creativeness sufficient to attract converts by cocktails.

Regardless of the origins, a Texas Tea is a pleasing summer time cocktail greatest made with a sturdy bourbon or spicier rye to slice by the sizable drink.