Iced Tea vs. Lemonade
Four combatants dish it out for their say on the ultimate summer drink.
by Vivian Zenari
You’re sitting on the patio on a hot summer afternoon. A rivulet of sweat is rolling down each temple of your reddened face. On the table in front of you is a pitcher of iced tea and a pitcher of lemonade. Which pitcher do you reach for?
If your patio guest happens to be Teresa Seibel, Chris Krock, Leanne Smoliak, or Kristina Pappas, you will get an earful of opinion.
Local beverage expert and award-winning mixologist, Chris Krock, insists that lemon is best. His cocktails almost always have some lemon in them. Lemon is far superior to tea, he insists, when it comes to mixing never mind on its own.
Teresa Seibel, a native Virginian living in Edmonton, has adapted to some local habits, but she has her limits. Seibel argues that, besides being much easier to make, iced tea is indeed amenable to mixing. Her iced tea routinely contains a mix of teas. Lemongrass tea, for instance, inserts lemony flavour into black teas without the calorie-boosting sugar. Besides, iced tea can complement any meal, whereas lemonade overwhelms other flavours and thus mitigates its usability.
Kristina Pappas echoes Krock’s views that lemonade permits more flexibility. The Tomato’s summer intern loves berry lemonade, for example, not to mention frozen lemonade. She also contends that lemonade’s tartness has thirst-quenching properties that are lacking in iced tea. She admits to having a crush on the Arnold Palmer, the mix of iced tea and lemonade popularized by the legendary golfer. Pappas is so devoted to lemonade that she considers the Arnold Palmer to be a kind of flavoured lemonade.
When she sees a glass of lemonade, however, all Seibel sees “is a big glass of carbs.” By carbs she means sugar. The citrus juice has plenty of sugar already, and since lemon juice is so tart, lemonade drinkers invariably add extra sugar. Iced tea does not contain sugar. If one wants lemony flavour, Seibel says, squeeze some drops of lemon into iced tea. She also worries about the acidity of lemons. If she finds herself drinking lemonade, she prefers to drink it out of a straw to protect her tooth enamel.
Krock takes issue with Seibel’s glass of carbs metaphor. He acknowledges that lemon juice contains sugar, but he points out that some teas might very well include plant matter with “a wheat profile” and thus lead to carbohydration. He adds, half in jest, that lemonade is a light-coloured drink, whereas iced tea drinkers prefer the darker liquid. Perhaps, they prefer the dark side of life. Krock quickly points out, however, that he has nothing against iced tea.
Leanne Smoliak, general manager of the Jubilee Auditoria and long-time fixture on Edmonton’s food and drink scene, has no quarrel with iced tea either. Nevertheless, for her and her lemon-loving cohorts, lemonade has connotations that iced tea lacks.
For Smoliak, lemonade invokes images of patio umbrellas, the sun and running through the grass. In short, summer. Krock says the word lemonade immediately casts him back to long Alberta days at the family cabin at Pigeon Lake where he drank his grandfather’s lemonade. Pappas ran a lemonade stand with her sister when she was a girl, selling a serving at fifty cents a pop. Sometimes neighbourhood kids would pitch in to help, making the enterprise both remunerative and communal. Besides, she says, people can drink tea all year round, while lemonade is something uncommon, reserved for the summer, and thus a bit more special.
Lemonade is not just for children, of course, as Smoliak points out. Just like winter is Manhattan Season, summer is Gin Season, and there is nothing better on a hot day than gin and lemonade. She likes to set up an ad hoc bar in the backyard with lemonade, a bowl of ice, elderberry syrup, gin, vodka and Saint Germain and let the adults lemon-and-booze up their tall glasses. Krock has made a career out of alcoholic drinks and he considers lemon a fantastic additive since its tartness balances the bitterness and sweetness of other ingredients.
Seibel is not about to let lemonade beat iced tea on the nostalgic charm offensive. She associates iced tea with her grandmother, who, back in hot, humid Virginia, always had tea in the refrigerator. Here, Edmonton lingo fails to capture the nuances of Southern culture. “My granma’s tea was always sweet tea,” she says. Sweet tea is different, in other words, than tea, which, Seibel points out, is available in American restaurants in the same way water is available and consumed, chilled and unsweetened. When she offers her sweltering patio guests in Edmonton some tea, she has to assuage their consternation by assuring them that by tea she means what Edmontonians call iced tea. Of course, she says, the purists back home will only ever drink “sun tea,” tea steeped not in boiled water, but in a jar of water and tea bags set out in the sun. Sun tea, she murmurs, tastes different than tea steeped in boiled water. She is not so fussy, though. Canadian-style tea is just fine.
In the end, these four combatants showed patience, rather than hostility, towards their adversaries. For them, there is room for both pitchers on a patio table.
Teresa’s Sweet Tea
Brew two tea bags of organic green lemongrass tea and one bag of organic orange pekoe tea in a tea maker. To the brewed tea add an equivalent amount of cold water and chill the mixture in the refrigerator. Pour a serving into a glass and add liquid stevia drops to taste.
Leanne’s Lemonade
In a pitcher, mix the juice of six or seven lemons, half a cup of simple syrup (sugar dissolved in hot water and then cooled), seven cups of water and ice. Float berries or mint in the lemonade. Variant: add one ounce of gin and one ounce of St-Germain (elderberry liqueur) to a tall glass of lemonade with some (not too much) ice.