Here in Canada, iced tea is something generally made from a powder mix you buy in a can. It has its merits for sure, but there's definitely something to be said for making your own from honest-to-goodness brewed tea.
Yesterday my husband had one of those shaken black tea lemonade drinks from Starbucks. It was good. Good enough for me to covet his drink over my own Cinnamon Dolce Latte and that's really saying something.
After a bit of googling, a bit of tweaking, I amalgamated the recipes I found online into this one:
Black Tea Lemonade
Tea:
4 teabags of your favorite black tea
1 litre (quart) boiling water
Steep for 4 minutes. Remove teabags. Let cool to room temperature.
Lemonade:
1 cup hot water
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 cup lemon juice
2 1/2 cups cold water
Dissolve the sugar in the hot water. (Because dissolving sugar in cold water is a pain.) Mix in the remaining ingredients. You could also skip this step entirely and use your favorite store-bought lemonade.
At this point you could throw the whole lot together with another 1/2 cup of sugar but I vary on how sweet I like my iced tea on a moment by moment basis. If you’re like me then just mix the tea and lemonade together at this point and put it in the fridge.
So say you go to pour yourself a nice cold glass of iced tea and find you want to sweeten it some more. You could use plain old granulated sugar. And spend the next 1/2 hour stirring it only to have sickly sweet yuck settled in the bottom of your glass. Nice.
Here’s where the syrup comes in. The following will dissolve into your cold tea perfectly:
Sweet Syrup:
1 cup sugar
1 cup water
Throw them both into a saucepan and heat until the sugar is completely dissolved. Cool and put in a container. Store in the fridge just to be safe.
OK! So when you want a drink, pour it over some ice. Sweeten with your sugar syrup to your taste.
Yummy!