Historical past of the Texas Tea Cocktail

On the subject of Texas Tea, larger actually is healthier. 

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 notably 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 course 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 known as Housekeeping in Previous 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 individuals looked for various drinks to exchange alcohol. (It’s additionally attainable that in this time, iced tea was a handy solution to conceal unlawful liquor consumption, and Prohibition-era bars would serve liquor in teacups to keep away from suspicion.)

Spiked tea punches have additionally lengthy been in style 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 present’s candy tea, containing a baffling array of wine, liquor, and sugar, comparable 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 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 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 could 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 almost definitely 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 dad or mum 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 development 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 individuals ask me in regards to the [Texas Cocktails] e book,” says Martini. “After I began, I researched the entire basic cocktails that got here from Texas and I discovered each of them: Ranch Water and Chilton. I suppose you might throw Mexican Martini in there however… gross,” he says.

Martini discovered an analogous affiliation when researching the Texas Fizz, which was really 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. Texas is extremely proud and Texas helps Texas,” says Martini. “I’ve moved arduous 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 once they have been, the truth is, 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 stated that Texas is a mind-set, however I believe it’s greater than that. It’s a mystique carefully approximating a faith.” 

Maybe that could be a higher approach of explaining the phenomenon of Texas Tea. The mystique of the state has captured in style creativeness sufficient to attract converts via 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 via the sizable drink.