National Iced-Tea Day in USA

The oldest recipes for cold tea were called punches. They used green tea and were spiked with liquor.

Tea was first grown in the US in South Carolina, the only state to have commercially produced it. While tea has been sipped hot here in America since Colonial days, nonalcoholic tea wasn’t widely consumed on ice until the turn of the 19th century, when entrepreneurs in the northern United States started shipping ice down South and to the Caribbean. As Americans began to take a leading role in the 19th-century global ice trade, the greater availability of ice made iced tea more common. Iced tea’s popularity took off in the early 1900s, after visitors to the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis embraced it.

Today, iced tea accounts for 84 percent of all the tea consumed in the United States, Danovich relays, citing statistics from the Tea Association of the U.S.A.