Historical past of the Texas Tea Cocktail

On the subject of Texas Tea, greater actually is best. 

Typically 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 varieties, together with lemon juice, easy syrup, and cola, what makes this drink significantly Southern is the addition of bourbon, which supplies 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 The oldest recognized recipe for candy iced tea was revealed in 1879 in a cookbook known as Housekeeping in Outdated Virginia by Marion Cabell Tyree, utilizing iced inexperienced tea, sugar, and lemon. By the 1900s, black tea turned the default for iced tea, and within the Twenties, Prohibition introduced alongside an iced tea increase as individuals looked for different drinks to exchange alcohol. (It’s additionally attainable that in this time, iced tea was a handy technique 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 standard 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 just like right this moment’s candy tea, containing a baffling array of wine, liquor, and sugar, resembling an 1839 punch recipe from Kentucky combining claret or Champagne with cream, numerous sugar, and inexperienced tea in a punch bowl. 

One of the vital well-known tea punch recipes, an American recipe known as Regent’s Punch from 1815, accommodates brandy, arrack, Champagne, and rum tempered with inexperienced tea, sugar, and citrus juice. It was successful 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 could be thought of the closest early progenitor of Texas Tea if the cocktail had been to comprise precise tea, which it doesn’t. The tea-like coloring comes from the cola and amber-hued bourbon.

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

In keeping with Classic American Cocktails, “The Texas Iced Tea was invented by TGI Fridays in 1980 to have a good time 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.

Nevertheless, Nico Martini, the Dallas-based writer 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 individuals ask me concerning the [Texas Cocktails] e-book,” says Martini. “After I began, I researched all the traditional cocktails that got here from Texas and I discovered each of them: Ranch Water and Chilton. I assume you can throw Mexican Martini in there however… gross,” he says.

Martini discovered an identical affiliation when researching the Texas Fizz, which was truly invented by two London bartenders.

“I all the time discover when individuals throw ‘Texas’ in entrance of one thing nevertheless it’s truthfully, all the time been advertising and marketing. Texas is extremely proud and Texas helps Texas,” says Martini. “I’ve moved laborious 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 had been, in actual fact, 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 could be a higher method of explaining the phenomenon of Texas Tea. The mystique of the state has captured standard creativeness sufficient to attract converts by way of cocktails.

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