The Modern Sage

Welcome back to the Modern Sage Life, y'all! Today's gonna be filled with a whole lot of "y'alls" and and sweet treats because today's post is all about one of the most beloved beverages in the Southern United States - sweet tea!  If you've never had sweet tea, let me enlighten you.  Sweet tea is a deliciously refreshing beverage made by combining freshly brewed tea with a generous amount of sugar (no surprise there).  Depending on who makes it/where you've had it from, sweet tea should be sweet, but not too sweet, and has the perfect balance of flavor to sweetness that will have you craving it on a hot summer day. The Tea on Sweet Tea Sweet tea has been a staple in the South since the 1800s, but its origins are somewhat murky.  Some people say that sweet tea was first introduced at the World's Fair in St. Louis in 1904, while others claim it was brought to the South by British colonists in the 1700s. (The Brits do love their tea).  Regardless of i...

  If you’ve spent any amount of time shopping for tea, going to tea houses, and of course drinking it, you’ll start to run into some familiar names like jasmine, black tea, rooibos, and mint. However, you have those and then you also have crazy teas like Kukicha, yerba mate, Lapsang Soucha, Lady Grey, and Gunpowder. To bring some order to the chaos, teas are divided into different categories.  While there are definitely way more than just 5 categories of tea (try more like 3000), the 5 basic types of tea are: White, Green, Oolong, Red, and Pu’er, and most teas are able to be categorized as one of the 5 types. The five main types of tea: White, Green, Oolong, Red, Pu'er Fun fact: all 5 types of tea come from the same tea plant – Camellia Sinensis Sinensis. *They are NOT tisanes/herbal teas. What distinguishes one tea as a white tea and not an Oolong or Pu’er has to do with its appearance, flavor, and most importantly processing. White Tea Starting with the least processed tea, ...