Kinks – "Afternoon Tea" (1967)

I take sugar with tea

You take milk if you please 

I please not!  (Milk in tea? Disgusting!)

*     *     *     *     *

The instructions for making hot tea on a box of Harris Teeter’s family-size tea bags are perfectly clear:

Bring fresh cold water to a rolling boil.  Pour 4 cups over 1 tea bag and brew for 3 – 5 minutes.  Remove tea bag.  If desired, serve with lemon and/or sweetener.

The instructions for making iced tea are just as clear:

Bring fresh cold water to a rolling boil.  Pour 4 cups over 1 tea bag and brew for 3 – 5 minutes.  Remove tea bag and pour over ice filled glasses.  If desired, serve with lemon and/or sweetener.

In other words, you prepare hot tea and iced tea exactly the same way – except that if you want iced tea instead of hot tea, you pour the tea into an ice filled glass! 

(Thank goodness for Harris Teeter’s instructions – I probably would have messed up without them!)

*     *     *     *     *

Years ago, I stopped buying soft drinks to have with the sandwiches or leftovers I used to take to work for lunch.  Instead, I started making batches of iced tea in the kitchen at my law firm’s offices.  That not only saved me a little money – the kitchen was kept stocked with free teabags, sugar, etc. – but also significantly reduced my daily high-fructose corn syrup consumption.

I retired in 2017, but I’m still making a big-ass batch of iced tea every few days in the same 96-ounce Tupperware container I used at work:  

Sure, it’s a little stained.  But that just adds to the complex flavor and bouquet of the beverage.

I have to buy my own teabags and sugar now, of course – but making iced tea is still cheaper (and healthier?) than buying bottles of Dr. Pepper. 

*     *     *     *     *

My sister puts me to shame when it comes to iced-tea consumption.  That’s pretty much all she drinks.

She’s pretty finicky when it comes to her tea.  She has some favorite restaurants where she lives that make fresh iced tea that meet her standards.

She also like the tea at McDonalds’s and Panera.  No other fast-food tea is acceptable.

I offer to let her make fresh iced tea from scratch when she visits me.  Oddly, she never takes me up on that offer – she makes do with McDonald’s or Panera.  (Go figure.)

*     *     *     *     *

Something Else by the Kinks is by the Kinks, but you probably would have figured that out without me telling you:

It didn’t sell well in either the U.S. or the UK when it was released in 1967, but it’s a great album with lots of good tracks – most notably, “Waterloo Sunset,” a beautiful and very romantic ballad.

As noted above, “Afternoon Tea” alludes to the curious practice of adding milk to hot tea that some Brits follow.  (Pretentious Americans who want you to think they went to Oxford or Cambridge or some such fancy-pants place also add milk to their tea.)  

Click here to listen to “Afternoon Tea.”  (One writer said the Something Else album “continued the Kinks' trend toward an eccentric baroque pop and music hall-influenced style defined by Ray Davies' observational and introspective lyrics.”  That description fits “Afternoon Tea” – get ready for it – to a “T.” )

Click here to buy the song from Amazon.